Jake Grewal Explores Landscape Painting While Capturing the Angst—and Joy—of Queer Life

On a summer evening last year, on a clifftop by Porthmeor Beach in Cornwall, southwest England, passers-by might have seen an artist in a tracksuit painting the sunset. Did people hassle him? “Obviously,” says Jake Grewal, the artist in question. “But in a really nice way. A dog would come up and sniff my cadmium paints. I’d be like, ‘Please take your dog away, it’s poisonous. I’m scared he’s going to die.’”

It’s surprising to think of a young artist today standing at an easel en plein air like Monet. But the gorgeous results of Grewal’s work are currently on show at the prestigious Studio Voltaire in London. Made up of 11 paintings completed in the past year, the London-based artist’s new exhibition is called “Under the Same Sky.” The smaller landscapes were made in Cornwall; Grewal had a monthlong residency at Porthmeor studios, where artists including Francis Bacon and Ben Nicholson once painted. “I could hear the sound of the ocean while I was in the studio,” Grewal remembers. “The residency came at a time when I had just turned 30, just had a breakup, and then I went to the bottom end of the country to be on my own. It allowed me to paint outside, and to experience those emotions in an organic way.”

The other big influence was Grewal’s first trip to India, which also took place last year. Previously, he would get irritated when people attributed the haziness of his landscapes, and their remarkable use of color, to his Indian heritage on his father’s side (his mother is Welsh). “But when I got there, I understood where people were coming from, because there are strange colors there that you wouldn’t normally see next to one another. And there is this haze everywhere.”

Although Trustlands, a long landscape in the show, is inspired by a photograph Grewal took in Goa, none of the beaches, rocks, or seascapes he paints are taken directly from life: they are composites of places he’s been, or scenes from his imagination. Often, the paintings contain naked male figures with their faces turned from the viewer, half-hidden in nature or clambering over rocks, as in the almost 19-footlong canvas The Cycle of Erosion. Those figures are self-portraits of a kind, but they also suggest enquiry, sexuality, and hope. “I wanted the show to be about freedom, openness, a memory of warmth, and a kind of contentment,” he says.

Grewal’s dreamy and confident paintings have won the artist an ardent following. The director Luca Guadagnino commissioned him to paint a work to use as a poster for his film Queer; before that, Grewal’s 2022 charcoal drawing The Sentimentality of Nature was acquired by Hepworth Wakefield, a renowned British museum, after he won the inaugural J.W. Anderson Collections Fund. The artist has a remarkable grasp of color, which he says is innate, and while he loves to immerse himself in art history, he is also keen to give himself technical challenges—for instance, by making charcoal look like paint and vice-versa.

Usually, he’s at his studio in east London from 11 AM to 6 PM. It takes him about three months to make a large painting, and he focuses on three to five canvases at a time. While he works, he listens to NPR’s Tiny Desk series, or to lectures by artists he admires like Peter Doig or Marlene Dumas. “Sometimes you can feel as if the only thing that matters is the show you’re making,” he says. “To think about other people’s perspectives on art and making can be quite liberating.”

Grewal was brought up in London and was inspired at school by an art teacher who taught him about J.M.W. Turner, Howard Hodgkin, and Barbara Hepworth. In 2013, he left for Brighton University, on the English south coast, to study fine art. “I was trying to do this thing where I was marrying drawing and painting,” he says. He became disillusioned, however, when he realized that to get a good grade, he was better off doing what the course required rather than genuinely experimenting.

After graduating in 2018, he had two paintings in a group show that were damaged in a fire. The insurance payout meant that he could afford to take a course at London’s Royal Drawing School, and those two years set him on the track he’s on today. The only problem was that in order to save money he had to live with his parents, which made him feel, he says, as though “my life was on hold, and I couldn’t develop personally.” Potential boyfriends would be put off by the fact that he hadn’t left home; a sense of yearning for the unobtainable is still discernible in his pictures, although, he says, “I’ve definitely had my fill since.”

Covid meant that he also had to stay in his parents’ house throughout lockdown, but that turned out to be another transformative period. “I discovered Kundalini yoga, which is quite spiritual, all about breath work,” Grewal says. “Doing a repetitive practice that was open and freeing, at a time when everything felt so restrictive and closed in, filled me with this audacious ease. I would go out and draw in the park every day.” Since the art world had shut down, there was no pressure on Grewal to launch his career. He thinks that having this break was crucial: “Things need a kind of gestation period.”

After lockdown, Grewal started selling his work on Instagram, and then in 2020 took part in the influential graduate show New Contemporaries, which, along with a show the following year at Jhaveri Contemporary in India with Prem Sahib and Sunil Gupta, “brought a more serious engagement” with his practice. He acquired representation by the gallery Thomas Dane, and last year participated in an exhibition at Pallant House, in Chichester, Sussex, alongside well-known “neo-romantic” artists. “I was looking at the darker elements of being a queer person, and of the landscape, and that’s something the British neo-romantics capture quite well.”

Grewal says that his work expresses some of the angst, as well as the joy, he feels as a queer person of color. “There’s a sense of othering that’s inherent to the queer experience,” he says. “Also, for me, I have felt a displacement because of my identity. There’s a question of whether, or where, you fit in.” In the new show, Grewal also experiments with a new kind of mysticism, which he attributes to his aunt. “She’s quite woo-woo and into Native American ways of thinking,” he says. “And apparently there’s this kind of spiritual veil, and when you’re by the coast, that’s where the veil is thinnest, and you can easily access other dimensions. So, I was thinking about that too.”