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

78 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
Cow and Evening Bird
Landscape with Cows
but one could see here the first point at
which the psychological landscape has
shifted to suggest a transformation of ideas
and personality. This might explain why the
only diary or notebook that Johnson kept to
the end of his life, perhaps the only diary he
ever wrote, detailed the time from the last
days before he left London until the day he
left Wilby.
Johnson had received a grant from the
Royal Academy in 1970 and was having
some success selling work at this time, even
Figures in a Landscape
if not necessarily through galleries; his
detailed ledgers record sales to various clients in London, Belfast and even Rome. Some works
went to supportive friends such as Cedra Castellain and we could assume that a number of these
sales were conducted through his occasional gallery exhibitions. An etching Untitled was included
in the 1975 Listowel Graphics Exhibition and he also showed work in an unrecorded loan
exhibition in Drogheda, both very possibly entered by the Dawson Gallery. The sums recorded
from these were small and as the 1970s progressed the ledgers change from a record of sales to a
record of works completed. Fewer large acrylic paintings are completed and Johnson increasingly
draws in ink, charcoal or biro, makes monotypes and etchings and experiments with newsprint
collages.
Johnson’s records for 1977 note a number of sales to a geographically diverse but anonymous
group of collectors, from Germany, the Lebanon, South Africa, Nigeria, the USA and Sweden.
Perhaps the lack of names indicates sales through a gallery which passed limited information back
to the artist. An alternative theory comes from the occasional references to ‘railings’ in the profits
of Johnson’s accounts; perhaps he was one of the anonymous artists who exhibit and sell their
work from park railings and therefore he knew little more than vague details about buyers. He
also left works with significant London dealers such as Alan Cristea at Marlborough Fine Art and
Christian Neffe of JPL Fine Art, an authority on the work of Bonnard, Vuillard and many others,
who remains an imaginative and passionate figure in the London art world.
But we must assume that times remained hard and that, as was important for Nevill Johnson,
there was a struggle for recognition as an artist. Only those who really have a drive to paint and
communicate continue to work while they have no audience and no reward for it, and he was one
of these. But, much as Victor Waddington had entered his life at a crucial moment, Johnson was to
meet another figure whose presence was to dominate the last twenty years of his professional life.
Nevill Johnson l Wilby and after 1959–1977 79