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

Johnson also expresses within the specific
landscapes that he paints; Connemara and
Minard both suggest an increasing time spent
within Ireland. An earlier painting of Minard
Castle, begun in 1972 and reworked in 1976,
reveals a different aspect to Johnson the
landscape painter. Rather than an ordered,
complex depiction, it is loose and non-linear,
full of event and narrative, with expressive
brushstrokes, more reminiscent of Soutine
than Johnson’s few usual artistic heroes.
Johnson’s work was now beginning to
change once again. His drawings had become
the shortcut to the workings of his mind in
the period following his re-assessment, and
now their invention prefigures the
development of the paintings. Picasso had
Annunciation
been perhaps the only painter in whom
Johnson had retained any interest, and much as Picasso turned in his later years to interpreting
some of the great paintings of his predecessors, such as Velazquez and Manet, so Johnson in his
mid-seventies began to revisit Picasso’s own reworkings. These pictures allowed the expression of
wit that had existed on the opposite side of the coin of much of Johnson’s earlier work. Perhaps
also Johnson recognised in Picasso the theme of magic as a key to understanding and perhaps
redemption.
By the early nineties the process of simplification and abstraction that had begun in the 1940s
had been resolved to the natural conclusion of work that appeared entirely non-referential,
although there were clear figurative starting points for most works. These were begun with an
acrylic ground, upon which Johnson completed a detailed but simplistic drawing in pencil. This
drawing is full of ideas, images, text, narrative. One unfinished work, that still remains at this
preparatory stage, has trains, figures, even a hoarding with the lettering for Guinness. Some of the
images created by the underdrawing are perhaps more accidental than literal, but they set up an
abstract arrangement, as well as establishing undercurrents of theme and mood.
Johnson would then begin, using a single colour, to pick out certain lines and shapes, elaborating
on certain passages, inventing in others aside from the lines of the drawing. Gradually the abstract
relationships take over from the underlying images. The effect of the completed paintings can be
96 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
Figure in a Landscape
Nevill Johnson l London 1978–1999 97