Nevill Johnson: Paint the smell of grass - Eoin O'Brien

how to deal with businessmen. Just over a decade later, he painted a commission for Cyril Lord,
whose carpet factory was near Donaghadee, on the north Down coast, close to the Johnson’s
home in the boathouse at Ballyhalbert. This contained particularly oblique references to the
factory and many of Johnson’s own concerns. Northern Ireland did have particularly enlightened
art lovers at this period, such as Zoltan Frankl, the eminent Belfast based collector who owned
Clown, an early painting now in the collection of Trinity College. But despite these early successes
and encouragements, Johnson still led his double life as artist and businessman.
Perhaps it was thanks to a connection with his French wife Noelle, that compatriots of hers
also living in Ulster, Paul Terris and his wife, invited the Johnsons to leave Belfast during the blitz
to live at their house, Knappagh Farm in County Armagh. Soon John Luke was also invited to
this refuge, although this seems to have been the last period during which the two were close.
Luke returned to a more and more reclusive and eccentric life in Belfast and soon abandoned easel
painting in order to devote himself to working on large public murals, which took an increasing
physical toll on him.
In contrast, Nevill Johnson’s exhibiting career was about to begin. In 1946 he showed six
paintings and a stone carving in a group show at the newly opened, and short-lived, Magaffin
Gallery, alongside Olive Henry, Max and Gladys Maccabe and Aaron McAfee, the former being
then probably the best-known and most proficient in this line-up of local talent. Some of these
works are known, others can be confidently identified. Already the germs of much of Johnson’s
work over the following decade are in place.
The titles alone betray his interest in religion, both in direct references (Mater Doloroso,
catalogue number 8), or with obvious thematic connections (Easter Landscape, catalogue number
7). The former is a direct attack on Johnson’s foremost target at this time, following his breaking
off relations with the church. A girl stands outside a cathedral, cradling an empty space filled out
by the shape of her absent baby. According to Johnson, his attack on the hypocrisy and cruelty of
the Catholic Church towards unmarried mothers led to Victor Waddington having to withdraw
the work from the Royal Hibernian Academy; the hold of the Church was so great in Ireland that
the art world had to give way.
Easter Landscape draws on religious iconography, the cross standing in a barren wilderness, to
express his sense of the post-war world. A development from the Kilkeel landscape, this is the
world of the atom bomb, bereft of spiritual comfort, where either we have turned away from God
or where our actions have made God abandon us. Nothing grows, natural colours have become
artificial and hallucinatory. What is left of life are the biomorphic or anthropomorphic forms
reminiscent of human life that appear in the MacGaffin exhibition in Two Shells and a Stick
(catalogue number 12). Johnson collected driftwood from the shore at Kilkeel and seems to have
particularly selected pieces that suggested the human figure. These were exhibited as sculpture at
20 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
Waddington’s, and they also were included in the paintings of the time. It is almost eerie now to
see one piece of driftwood that is still known, which was painted as if striding across a desolate
shore sixty years ago. They suggest that whatever apocalyptic event has stripped the land of the
vegetation, colours, sky and animal and human life that are familiar to us, they have now mutated
into these skeletal forms. The earth has lost its beauty, its humanity and its spiritual nourishment.
This is the existential inner landscape of the post-war being. As Johnson’s thoughts unfold in his
painting it becomes clear that it is humanity that has caused this.
Nevill Johnson l The Belfast years 1934–1946 21