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

enjoying the peace and anonymity of a life surrounded by animals and birds and few humans, and
more conscious of a kinship with the men of past generations who had planted and maintained
the land as he did, the absence of hope in many of the barren post-war landscapes had been
replaced by a spiritual respite. Johnson now senses our place in some sort of harmony with the
renewal of the natural world.
But whereas this softer and more lyrical, almost nostalgic atmosphere becomes apparent in the
paintings of the later 1970s, these paintings are highly abstracted, linear and mechanised.
Johnson’s interest in physics and, more generally, in analysing the structure of human life is even
more apparent here than in the last paintings from his time in Dublin. Understanding how our
psychological nature is established, as well as the molecular and mathematical structure of the
world we see around us and our interaction with it, all informed Nevill Johnson’s approach to
painting at this time. As such complex and uncertain material could never be replicated on its own
terms on canvas, board or paper, he sought in his work to create a visual equivalent to suggest
this fragmentation and as such to also describe the confusion and alienation of the human being
in an increasingly dehumanised world: “concrete, glass and steel are cruelly inorganic…We
humans are dwarfed, bullied and chivvied around these monstrous structures, our stature denied,
our pride ignored…the quality of life is muffled and eroded. We have become onlookers –
spectators of a system beyond our reach and touch.”
Johnson has by the late 1960s established a visual vocabulary that he used through to the
apparently non-referential paintings of the 1990s. Most striking is his extremely complex
rendering of space. This is done without any imitation of a three dimensional space, a
development of the ‘stage set’ worlds he created in Cocotte or House by the Canal, for example.
68 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
this exhibition, but equally present are potentially threatening figures that suggest difficulties in
communication. Bossman is extremely difficult to read beyond the hands at either side that reach
out towards us. Confrontation, Storm over Garden, Wasteland are unsettling. In another, less
abstract, work of the time, a man leans back with a drink, his head turned towards a group of
figures who have just entered the room.
The isolation and threat of A Voice Crying, The Stranger or Toi et Moi has become less literal
and less dramatic by 1970 but the everyday world that Johnson presents remains tense, complex
and mysterious to us. His world is his own, but there is undeniably something of Beckett within
it. Despite his stylistic closeness to the most rigorous analytical cubism, it is difficult to find any
context for Johnson’s painting in London in the early 1970s. The influence of America had
instigated the non-referential Situation painting of the late 1950s and pop had dominated the
1960s. Francis Bacon was the painter to whom all contemporary painters looked in Britain at that
My Father’s House was a title Johnson was to use on a number of occasions, perhaps in reference
to his attitude towards the Church, his failed relationship with his own father or referring to the
passage that begins thus in the Bible, perhaps suggested merely by the ambiguity of its
implications. The painting sets up an interrelated series of planes that overlap and pull us in and
out of the picture space, suggesting levels of recession but without offering any static point
at which the painting loses its dynamism. The rhythmic drawing that works between these
planes is a mixture of more lyrical, cursive description of figures with awkward and tentative
linked geometric and circular shapes that, in other paintings, suggest a strange and contorted
machine.
Other titles Johnson was to continue to use included The Machine for Saying Yes and The
Machine for Saying Hello, the former first appearing in the 1970 exhibition. Unsettled by the
increasing mechanisation of life in the late 1960s, Johnson saw even basic human contact reduced
to the action of machinery, eroding the magic that he had tried to express in the previous decade.
The romanticism that Wilby was to bring to his painting in the 1970s is a small element within Untitled
Nevill Johnson l Wilby and after 1959–1977 69