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

side of the glass”. This world he shows the narrator presents the ‘real’ world of February 1975 as
a ridiculous but unpleasant stage against which the world has reacted and which it employs as a
reminder of how wrong a path we took. As the story develops, Johnson undermines the logic and
rules according to which we believe the world runs.
“But I reckon those wearing a doubtproof carapace of logic must inevitably cut themselves off
from the surprise and magic of life. Certainly for Mrs K everything appeared to be plain sailing.
There was a place and a meaning for everything. But in a world where two and two make four
there is precious little room for laughter and ecstasy.” Presumably the other side of six is where
two and two do not necessarily make four. Much as Johnson the painter has created a world where
there are gaps in logic that are filled with the suggestions of all the possibilities that transform our
conception of human life and the world we inhabit, so his autobiography reminds us of the
fluidity of our world and the limits of our understanding.
It is revealing how rarely a man who analysed himself so ruthlessly made self-portraits. One
does date from the year his autobiography was published and reinforces the complexity of any
attempt to pin down a clear or single identity. ‘Johnson’ stands looking out at the viewer and
holds a self-portrait drawing, reminding us that this picture-within-a-picture is no different from
the self in the painting.
By this stage he was achieving a steady run of sales; the Arts Council of Ireland, the Board of
Works and the Allied Irish Bank all purchased work from the 1980 exhibition and in 1981 he
returned to Belfast with a solo exhibition in November. Increasingly in his ledgers it is clear that
the majority of his work is being sent to Tom Caldwell, although sales seem a little slower in the
1981 exhibition, with seven paintings sold. The highest price is still £600, although a small (four
by seven inches) painting in acrylic, Country Still Life, sold for £200. Belfast was a city with a
small circle of dedicated collectors, knowledgeable about local art, despite the constant threat of
violence from terrorists. A number of these works also appeared in Johnson’s subsequent
exhibition at Tom Caldwell’s in Dublin in May 1982, where sales totalled £1,800.
It was possibly for reasons of Johnson’s health (he was now in his seventies) that there appear
to have been no further exhibitions at the Caldwell Gallery until 1987, when a mini-retrospective
of paintings from 1976 to 1987 took place. By this point his work had become increasingly
abstracted; figures, other objects and landscapes are broken down into passages of geometric
shapes that through their formal unity convey an emotional weight at the same time as the clarity
of image becomes more ambiguous.
GAEA can possibly be read as another self-portrait, a monumental seated figure surrounded
by cats. They are the familiar with which Johnson empathised so strongly and which appear in so
many paintings that it is tempting to see this as an equally real ‘self’ to the two human depictions.
There is a mythic quality about the figure in GAEA, as there is about Mariner’s Lady, which
92 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
GAEA
Nevill Johnson l London 1978–1999 93