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

for thirty years when, in 1981 a selection appeared in Dublin: the people’s city. The photographs of
Nevill Johnson 1952-53, with an interesting introduction by Johnson and a foreword by James
Plunkett. This publication was seriously flawed by poor reproduction that did a grave disservice
to the photography. These unique images of a city and its people poised to step from an aeonian
past into a turbulent future in which all would change utterly, must now surely be published in
their totality in a sensitive format with duo-tone reproduction of the photography.
Another Dublin work of Johnson’s that may interest the bold and daring is the Symphonie
pour un homme seul, later renamed Goonstone, a surrealistic cinematic romp in which love,
violence, pornography and death are portrayed in Dublin “a total microcosm of a city on the lifesupporting
planet, Earth.” This work, which was never published, even less became a reality, is a
film script filling some 60 pages of text. There are elaborate instructions as to how the complex
series of flashbacks – present action in black and white, flashbacks in colour or sepia – are to be
integrated. There was to be little dialogue because “words have become suspect, devalued, hence
GOONSTONE’S silence. HE is NOT deaf – just wise.” The film is symphonic in form with seven
movements and there are detailed directions for the sound sequences; “The blackbird is used to
denote tranquility – and (in alarm) approaching violence. Apart from the Valse Grise
accompanying smalzy sequences with Giggy, I want only natural sounds (Larks, corncrakes –
128 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
Old Men Sitting, St. Stephen’s Green
becoming rarer through industrial farming), and man-made (peace-destroying) noises – Musak,
M/C’s etc. – except for Karl Orff’s Catullus at the beginning of Adam and Giggy’s love-making
in Marram grass – which is followed by early Erotica.” Likewise the directions for character
casting are clearly stated, for example, “Anna – (Livia, Plurabelle, Molly/Ulysses) Earth woman.
No ratting here. Sensual, quiet, content” and “Giggy – sixteen on first flashback. Twenty-five on
second flash-back. Kind, pinheaded, very sexy, passive, romantic blonde. A very sexy body.” As I
said Goonstone is for the bold and daring but who will dare fail?
In Dublin the painting went on – this was a prolific period for Johnson living in a variety of
addresses – Raglan Road and Convent Place in the city and Ticknock in the mountains of Dublin.
In the pubs the babble of witty conversation untainted by television or other distractions could
be enjoyed – “I stepped out to join a weird company; a throng of crazed polemicists, smart Alecs,
winking know-alls, jokers and gentle men: In the pubs of Hartigan, McDaid, the Bailey and
Byrne’s, O’Dwyer, O’Neill and Mooney’s on the bridge and after nighttime Powers and poteen,
there were the characters – apple-cheeked O’Sullivan Paddy Kavanagh, Augustan headed Behan
and old Liam O’Flaherty, and “Myles feeding our vanity and sanity in the Irish Times’.” Add to
this the background figures, such as Harry Kernoff “rising every morning from his bed into his
hat”, Sean O’Sullivan, Denis Johnston, Micheál MacLiammóir, and Con Leventhal, but to name
a mere few and it is small wonder that one wag seeing Johnson approach his group exclaimed “O
god, there are too many of us left”.
And women – always an important influence and necessity – helped sustain the painter: “Amid
these turbulent waters stood the bollards and mooring posts of my work. I had set up a teaching
school, but my main income derived from wealthy ladies who desired to render the pretty colours of
their gardens and drawing rooms; my ‘hollyhockers’, I called them. A profitable exchange ensued.”
But even Dublin could not hold Johnson indefinitely. The city had served a need in him;
he had served the city on canvas, celluloid and in prose. It was time to be off: “I needed
the wilderness – and a voice crying. In such mood I broke away from Waddington and jettisoned
the bait; I brushed away the dust of Dublin and set off again for London – to be an exile in my
birth land, to be an oddball in that country of class and compromise, that well swept catacomb
of logic and commonsense. ‘Why don’t you give up painting and get a proper job’, they would
say.”
In Chalk Farm he was befriended by Cedra Castellain, who gave him a roof with fellow painters
Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. This was a period when Johnson drifted, painting
murals in clubs and bars. “I took work where I could (Dura Virum Nutrix) as painter, decorator,
any old job – creating nothing, but surviving, stoic, biding my time, a grail-seeking misfit.” The
lowest point came when he took a job as a milkman leading his electric float through “the cold
dawns and misty streets” of London. “I was rudderless though not yet beaten down.”
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