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

of relating to the world, a way in which he could pursue, clarify and express his own ideas. He
had no interest in being an artist for its own sake or to make money from it.
For these reasons, once self-doubt and frustration began to dog him in Dublin, one can see
why its effect was so dramatic. Financial reward, status or reputation meant nothing if his painting
did not achieve its intentions for him and progress seemed blocked.
In the meantime, in the search through the works of the last decade for a key to unearthing
some spiritual meaning and regenerative power in the world, Johnson sought a way to introduce
a concept of magic into his painting. John Berger wrote “To some extent all art derives its energy
from the magical impulse – the impulse to master the world by means of word, rhythm, images
and signs. Magic first led man to the beginnings of science. And now, modern science confirms,
if not the practice, at least some of the concepts of magic…Magic offered a blueprint of a unified
world in which division – and therefore alienation – was impossible…Magic may be an illusion,
but it is less profoundly so than utilitarianism.” 3
In The Other Side of Six Johnson notes his interest in the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake, who
“writes of time and space-denying chreodes bearing atavistic messages from a deep primeval code
through morphogenetic fields which determine our behaviour – and write our songs.” He makes
a connection with these latent powers, magical or occult (in the sense of latent or unknown) and
making a good drawing or looking back at a painting.
Two large, ambitious and presumably related canvases that date from the second half of the 1950s
try to fuse magic and science and create this unified world. One was commissioned by Cyril Lord,
whose carpet factory near Donaghadee, on the coast of north Down, looks out over the Copeland
Islands. The painting looks out over a stylised arrangement of small jagged islands, one larger one
with what appear to be ruined buildings, with a large cogged wheel in the foreground, on which
sit a small box with windows, a beach ball and a large red cone, these acting as two symbols of
the factory and its seaside location. The cone is inscribed with magical symbols and it is the force
that dominates and unifies this unsettling and dehumanised landscape, in which even nature
seems to threaten.
The fragmentation of form and the disruption of the illusion of space that marked other
paintings of the early 1950s is used here in a much more advanced form, so that it seems to
battle with the cone to control the landscape. Johnson’s omnivorous intelligence was also
fascinated by science in all its aspects and he saw in this attempt to break down form a search to
find a visual parallel in paintings for the unfixed molecular structure around us. We tend to settle
comfortably into a single view of a world that is never fixed, and these paintings seek to make us
3 John Berger ‘Success and Failure of Picasso’, Penguin, London, 1965, p. 99
52 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
Composition
Nevill Johnson l The Dublin years 1947–1958 53