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

physical structure of our surroundings and the metaphysical revelations implicit in this structure.
To express this truth with clarity and honesty is the responsibility of the artist.
If Nevill Johnson’s work is the creation and examination of a highly personal psychological
landscape, it remains a landscape in which these private issues co-exist alongside broader meanings
and implications. The paintings of the 1940s were rarely far removed from the world around him,
which provided the shape of his symbolic world; shores and mountains drawn from the unique
landscape of Northern Ireland. The 1950s began to people this harsh landscape with travelling
people and those disdainful of society and its rules, such as he found in Dublin and the Wicklow
hills. Through these he expressed a vision of the post-war world, physical in its expression but
deeply spiritual in its implication. Johnson saw the world around him with an intensity that made
the biblical references of his work a natural development.
But the years at Wilby transformed the metaphor by which Johnson as a painter understood
the world around him and his own life. The deep impression of those years, the physical
experience of living that harsh and primitive rural life which could still be found in England in the
1960s, as well as the metaphysical experience of that intense loneliness, the self-examination as an
72 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
Still Life
Earthman
Nevill Johnson l Wilby and after 1959–1977 73