Returning to Jack House

Jack House began with a simple idea: to create a geometric image of a house, reduced to its essential forms.

View the series here: https://www.timmuddiman.com/the-jack-house

The design draws on the principles of modernism, with an emphasis on clarity, proportion, structure and the relationship between form and colour. I've always been interested in the way a limited set of shapes and colours can create something recognisable, balanced and full of character.

But the image is also a house, and that gives the work another dimension.

My wider practice has long been concerned with architecture, place and the relationship between people and the environments they inhabit. I'm interested in what buildings represent, the sense of identity and belonging they provide, and the personal stories that become attached to them.

Jack House brought these interests together in a single, recurring image long before I fully understood what it meant.

More than fifty original Jack House paintings have found homes with collectors. Each has explored the same underlying design through different colour combinations, proportions and compositions. The structure remains recognisable, but the character of each painting changes.

The new paintings explore a range of colour directions, from the deep reds and near-blacks of Red Iron to the warmer tones of Ochre and Umber, as well as the larger composition Origin. The modernist structure remains at the centre of each work, while colour changes the way we read the image.

What interests me is the possibility of continuing to explore one design without exhausting it. There is no definitive version of Jack House. Each painting is another interpretation, another way of looking at the relationship between geometry, colour and the idea of home.

The design stays fixed. Everything around it changes.

This is the beginning of a new chapter for Jack House, and I'll be adding further paintings to the series as it develops.

The changes are small. "But the image is also a house. And that gives..." is now one sentence. The line about bringing your interests together was the only real tangle: "brings" became "brought" and "truly understood what it fully meant" became "fully understood what it meant", since "truly" and "fully" were doing the same job. "and the larger composition Origin" is now "as well as the larger composition Origin", so the list reads cleanly.