The sea here in Folkestone never stays the same. The light shifts constantly, soft and still one hour, then the sky turns heavy and the water comes in hard. That push and pull between calm and wildness runs through everything I make.

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I build my paintings in layers, working intuitively and responding to what's emerging on the canvas. But there's a structural intelligence underneath that too. I'm always thinking about balance, space and composition, and that tension between feeling and order is as present in how I work as it is in the finished piece.

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My background is in design, and I've never quite lost the habit of thinking about how a painting will live in a room, how it holds its space, what it asks of the person who wakes up to it each morning. I want the work to reward that kind of attention.

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Recently I've been leaving more of the process visible. The raw marks, the rough edges, the parts I would once have painted over. I've found those are often where the energy lives. Not everything needs to be resolved to feel complete.

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​Jeannine Close is an abstract painter based on the southeast coast of England. Before becoming a full-time artist she worked in fashion design and luxury interior design, and that grounding in composition and colour continues to inform her practice. Her work has been shown at The Other Art Fair in London and Manchester Art Fair, and is held in private collections internationally.

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