Tess Jaray RA is a painter and printmaker who studied at St Martin's School of Art (1954 - 1957) and the Slade School of Art (1957 - 1960), where she later taught for many years.
Her work is characterised by the enigmatic interaction of forms and colours. The patterns she creates suggest spatial ambiguities and shifting structures which work on the viewer's perceptions in subtle ways. For over 50 years she has used painting, drawing and printmaking to explore and expand her personal interactions with architectural space, mass, surface and light. While her work may present as nonrepresentational, it is invariably informed by lived experiences of the visual world – what Jaray terms ‘[the] geometry of human relationships’.
She has artworks in many public collections, including the Tate and the British Museum, and her paving designs can be seen in Centenary Square, Birmingham and the forecourt of Victoria Station. In 2010 she published a book of her collected writings, Painting: Mysteries and Confessions.
