The Alchymical Garden of Michael Foy
by Seán Jefferson
forewords by David Rankine and William Rose
The Alchymical Garden of Michael Foy is a visionary cycle of paintings and texts by British Symbolist artist Seán Jefferson: a work of pastoral sorcery, alchemical imagination, and charged image-making in which the ancient Royal Art of Alchemy is transmuted into the language of contemporary painting.
Inspired by the twenty-two emblematic images of Splendor Solis, Jefferson’s Garden unfolds as a living theatre of fairies, poisonous plants, spirit presences, chthonic animals, Qabalistic pathways, Celtic survivals, and dream-born apparitions. At its centre stands Michael Foy: ancestral guide, contrarian familiar, and hidden intelligence of the work, whose presence is invoked as both catalyst and companion in the artist’s Great Work.
Here, painting becomes neither mere illustration nor aesthetic ornament, but an operative vessel. Pigment, symbol, automatism, folklore, and visionary perception are brought together in a process of solve et coagula, through which the invisible is given body and the body is returned to mystery.
The result is a distinctly British alchemical landscape: lush, dangerous, humorous, haunted, and spiritually alive.
Across its three cycles of imagery, The Alchymical Garden of Michael Foy draws upon over fifty years of Jefferson’s research into Symbolist art, Spiritualism, fairy faith, Golden Dawn colour symbolism, Jungian transformation, Surrealist automatism, and the occult current that has always moved beneath the surface of visionary art. It is a book for those who understand that images may be portals, landscapes may be grimoires, and strange beauty—when properly ensouled—may become a mode of initiation.
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Table of Contents
The Alchymical Garden — A Foreword by William Rose
Impressions — A Foreword by David Rankine
Part One: Green Dragon Distillation
The Images — Section One: Paintings
The Images — Section Two: Drawings
Intermezzo: The Elimination of a Cycle of Pictures and their Subject
Part Two: Red Dragon Distillation
Part Three: Black Dragon Distillation
List of Illustrations
Editions
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Includes 29 full-page colour paintings and many more black + white and colour line drawings and seals.
Fine Hardcover Edition - Limited to 300 copies
160 pages. Bound in high quality, green/black Peyer Duchesse fine linen cloth, manufactured in Germany. Features an embossed cover, lettering on rounded spine. Printed on premium 135 gsm wood-free silk glossy paper for excellent art reproduction. Features Peyer Surbalin endpapers, headbands and a ribbon marker.
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Press, reviews, endorsements
“(The Alchymical Garden of Michael Foy) is a portal. Within its beautifully produced covers and finely illustrated pages there is a wealth of knowledge. A knowledge and intuition that presses upon the border that lies between manifest reality and dimensions that can perhaps only be described by the symbolism within art, poetry, and music…”
William Rose, from the foreword
Interview with Seán Jefferson at his major exhibition at Messum’s St. James Gallery - watch on YouTube here
Interview with Seán Jefferson on the Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast - listen here
Article written by Seán Jefferson entitled Spiritual Psychedelia and Art - read it here
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About the Author
Seán Jefferson’s paintings are quite unlike anything any contemporary British artist is exhibiting today.
Immediately striking, wholly unforgettable, they’re an extraordinary combination of literary and artistic influences and experiences that have evolved over his past thirty-five years as a professional artist. Born in south-east London in 1957, Jefferson studied Microbiology at Imperial College, London, where he developed both his observational skills and his draughtsmanship making careful records of plants and microbiological specimens.
Whilst it was the tea-time TV publicity surrounding the death of German surrealist Max Ernst in 1976 that inspired him to become an artist, it is the earlier tradition of nineteenth-century British visionary art that is evoked in his paintings: William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Richard Dadd, G.F. Watts, the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood, Symbolism and Art Nouveau all have their place. But this is combined with a fascination with magic and folklore, as well as an early love of psychedelic art.
After periods living and working in Amsterdam and Cornwall, Jefferson now lives near Shoreham, Kent, where Samuel Palmer painted his early visionary paintings. He has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and Russia, but 2020 exhibition was his first major solo show in over twenty years. Since then, Jefferson has used his work to return to his routes as a painter, and 'to get back into the mindset in which I set out to become a professional artist.’ The paintings evoke what he calls ‘an obsessive need to explore and attempt to comprehend the Universe and everything in it.’ They are ‘infused with a mix of Folk Revivalism, the Occult and Art Nouveau mixed with a fading Psychedelia, long hair and outrageously large Bellbottoms ...'
