Lillian’s Reviews > Jack B Yeats, Painting And Memory > Status Update

Yeats preferred not to talk at length about his practice, provide explanations of the content and character of his paintings, or indicate what inspired them specifically.
MacGreevy recalled that the artist did not wish his paintings to be interpreted literally, but intended the spectator to understand each picture personally - to contribute to the work of art in [their] own way.

Yeats had a sophisticated relationship with memory, never allowing his musings to become hackneyed or weighed down by sentimentality. Nostalgia played a part in his thinking, but did not define the odyssey of life that inspired his art.

It is remarkable that Yeats did not produce his first oil painting until he reached his early thirties, and only began painting in oils regularly at the age of thirty-eight.
By the time he relinquished a documentary inclination in favour of an expressionistic sensibility, he was approaching sixty.