Jinny Heath

Jack Heath completed a series of large, striking works on the theme of thorns in the last years of his life, and all are dated 1969, the year of his death. The forms are powerfully inventive and exquisitely drawn and organized, often using the principles of the Golden Section. Close up, the textures created by the precise placing of paint are quite mesmerizing.

Jane’s assured and inventive love of paint,  belle peinture, is always evident in her work, and she continued to study her craft to the end of her long life.

The seriousness and power of Jack’s large paintings contrasts with his hugely playful and inventive works on paper, which are quite unique.

Looking into the French doors to the studio at 11 Roberts Road, the old family home. A very considered piece of late Modernist abstraction.

The jug, coffee pot, pot plants and pear are oft-repeated motifs in the work of both Jane Heath and Jinny Heath. The jug has been used in oil and acrylic paintings, watercolours, etchings, lithographs, woodblocks and wood engravings. 

This piece, one of a series of playful and inventive mixed media works, formed part of a One Man show at Gallery 101 in Johannesburg in 1962.

Jane Heath worked in many media with confidence and skill, and her sense of drawing was immaculate. This watercolour shows the foothills of the great Drakensberg range, with  swirling clouds obscuring the mountains above.

One of a series of paintings and studies about the doorways and spaces in the Heath Family home, and the evocative magic of the light which was such an integral part of the house.

Jack Heath made several series of highly original, formally inventive works on paper, often with intriguing and playful titles related to the times. 

Jane Heath’s knowledge of, and feeling for, geometric structure in painting remains strongly evident in this work, made two years before her death at the age of eighty-three in 1995.

In the manner of many early ecclesiastical stained glass windows, he uses vivid, saturated primaries in his palette.

Also, the painting clearly makes reference to stained-glass, as in ‘Strange City’

B J Heath resumed etching in 2016, after a break of more than two decades. The density of texture and ‘colour’ reflects the influence of Jack Heath’s work from the 1930s.

Jack Heath’s fascination with thorns, both their form and their mulriple possible meanings, started shortly after his arrival in South Africa in 1947, and remained with him until the year of his early death in 1969, when he produced the powerful painting “Thornveld Fire”

Collection South African National Gallery. Image courtesy Iziko Museums of South Africa.

This powerful work is a companion piece to “Blue Thornveld”, which was sadly destroyed by fire in July 2015.