Photo: Watermark Gallery
Born 1950 in York, the painter Jake Attree now lives in Saltaire and has a studio at Dean Clough, Halifax.
He attended a secondary modern school in York and his art education was initially at York College of Art, then Liverpool Art College, and finally at the Royal Academy of Arts, 1974 -77, where he gained the Creswick Prize and Landseer Prize respectively for his landscape and figure work.
His work has been exhibited widely at solo shows across Britain, including at Cartwright Hall, Bradford, and in Holland, Germany and the USA.
Jake’s work can be found in public art galleries, including at York, Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, the University of Sheffield, and overseas at Dortmund. The Nuffield Trust and ‘Paintings in Hospitals’ project has acquired his work, and it has also been bought for private collections worldwide. His work is represented in London by Messums of Cork Street, who held an exhibition of his work in 2016.
A number of his paintings were also featured by the Mercer Gallery, Harrogate, in their 2018 ‘Great Yorkshire Art’ exhibition, of significant artwork by past and living regional artists.
In 2016 he collaborated with the poet Robert Powell to illustrate the limited edition book, ‘A Small Box of River’, inspired by a series of walks along the Ouse and Foss rivers in York. The drawings for the book were exhibited at the Lotte Inch Gallery, and later at Salts Mill, Saltaire, during 2016.
In October 2016, describing his working method to the Yorkshire Post, after making initial sketches of a scene, Jake works in his Dean Clough studio to complete the work. His paintings are often thickly textured with oil paint: “They start off quite thin and then if I don’t get them right to begin with I just keep putting it on.”
Beacon Hill from North Bridge, Halifax. Image: see artist’s website, above.
Website: Jake Attree