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

56 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
Foreign City
learn his trade and practise it, and there is no question that much of his best work was painted in
the 1940s and 1950s.
Very little of his mature work draws on Ireland as a subject, either in terms of place or people,
although in his photography he left, in my opinion, the most rounded and eloquent visual portrait
of Dublin that exists. Perhaps it needed an outsider to carry this off. Arguably, most Irish painting
does not simply draw on its country and people and traditions as subjects, it becomes confined
by them. A painter of purpose can take what is closest to hand and give it a resonance that any
human being can understand and learn from. This is not a simple judgement as many Irish
painters needed their native land to find the spark of invention within them. Gerard Dillon might
be an example of this as, although much of his painting of the west of Ireland becomes
sentimental, occasionally there is a broader poetry that he achieves.
Part of Nevill Johnson’s importance in Ireland, in my opinion, lies in his refusal to be seduced
and diverted by the soft charms of his adopted land away from making serious comment on what was
happening outside it. His painting was driven by the passion for visual invention and communication
that was in him as a boy, but he matched this with a reason to use this passion, a sense of moral
Magdalene
Nevill Johnson l The Dublin years 1947–1958 57