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

will to continue & suddenly regain innocence. Will probably get it alright now. ... I’m actually
painting with colour for the first time...If. What do you mean if – Eden succeeds, my whole life
will literally change. If this is the breakthrough I think it is, it will be surely remarkable – after 81/2 Years. I’m surely on the edge of great joy & health and activity.... Eden is finished. For better or
worse. Here for the first time ever, I have painted with paint. This is the beginning. I hope they
like it. So it will be easier to go on. Though I surely will go on regardless. Indeed not keen on a
few days in London. Though they are necessary. I am cracked and scrofulous and too hermetic.”
Biblical names abound in the Johnson oeuvre. There are many versions of Annunciation and
it is sometimes difficult to know if later versions are, in fact, modified from the earlier painting:
“Finished preparation of Annunciation. Prepared all remaining panels white emulsion... and when
Annunciation succeeds, life and general activity will be quite changed....HO - HO. The Annun
coming on very splendidly. Frighteningly? So, when this is finished the road will be clear, or rather
stuffed with wads of splendid relief. And a flood of all work, energy & health. How about
that....ENDLISCH. The Annunciation barely finished & v pleasing. Now the flag is up. All
versions but related problems fell in to shape in working this, the first real painting I ever made.
Now it is just a matter of health & time.”
Betrothal gives an interesting glimpse into Johnson’s methodological approach to painting:
“Now working on Betrothal. big 48.43. Sketches completed. Hope draw it up today. But will
make fire on the line...Next a severe cold. & exhaustion + palpitation & shortness of breath for
several days. A daily fight against the dark frost. Withdrew to parlour & worked on Betrothal. But
rarely started till 6 pm... A long well-meant day’s work painting on Eden with atrocious results.
But another good lesson. And I review Betrothed in the light of the coffee grinder. This last really
has it. Moral down. And oil paint in first stages must be water thin. Six hours ahead & the best
of luck. Dear God I’ve been a long time digging. Isn’t it time I had a crop.”
Other paintings named in the Diary during this productive period are Cow parsley, Krapp
(back to Beckett), The Letionial “(Yes another big one up. The Letionial (bad title). Done in very
rapid very short bursts. The glue is richly rapid.”), Picnic (“Two child figures amid cow parsley’,
Now it’s nearly finished. And it is full of magic. And’ colour”), Wilby orchard; Orchard with bird;
‘Wilby Orchard with white cat; Woman in landscape with white cat & strange creature; Nuns in
harbour; Nude; Cornfield; Kitchen table and Seated woman.
Sales, as always, were few and far between. We find mention of The Sun Man being sold to
Owen Franklin for £35, and Apples (for £35) and Chair (for £30) to Frank Mathyshead, and Hill
top with 3 birds (20?.19?) to Brigit Mackenzie for £20. Poor sales were not for want of trying.
Johnson brought his work to many galleries – more than twenty London galleries are listed –
largely without success. But characteristically he could never down his anchor for long and he
soon returned to the “din and the shoddy streets of Notting Hill.”
134 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
I first met Nevill in the early eighties when he was exhibiting at Tom Caldwell’s gallery in
Fitzwilliam Street. We found much common ground – life, beauty, women and, of course, the
demon of ‘Byrne’s Pub’. In The Other Side of Six there is a delightful dissertation on alcohol: “I
examine the empty glass – ifteen pints a week by 52 weeks for fifty years. Thirty nine thousand
(39,000) pints. Yes. They should ring glad bells at opening time, I thought. O well, thus drank,
no doubt Diogenes, thus Kepler, certainly Behan. Drinking is for younger men; provers,
improvers, disprovers – and the hopeless ones.” A line from the Wilby diaries – “Old jazz fetches
me. I need dancing” brings back a fragment of our conversation at this first meeting, when Nevill
told me that one of his favourite escapes was “dancin with nigga women in Camden Town.” It
was at this meeting that he gave me a copy of his autobiography, The Other Side of Six. Our
friendship grew and when I published The Beckett Country in 1986, Nevill gave generously of his
Dublin photographs, which were reproduced for the first time to a standard befitting their artistic
merit.
The last decade of Nevill’s life was of
necessity preoccupied with health, or
rather lack of it. “On shaky legs I entered
the winter of my seventieth year, a sad bag
of muscle and gut, humbled and prepared
to listen.’ Take it easy’, they said, ‘and
you’ll last a few years yet’.” He lasted quite
a few years and painted away continuously
and true to previous form destroyed much
of his work. I visited him regularly during
this period. One day as we sipped beer in
the Churchill Arms, he invited me back to
his little studio in Peel Street to “share the
mood he was transmitting to canvas”. I
was astounded by the ten or so canvases he
showed me. I asked if he had suffered
much in their execution. He did not reply
but asked why I thought there might have
been pain. I felt in the paintings an intensity of personal involvement, an Augustinian expression
on canvas. He acknowledged that whereas the creation of a good painting might invoke great pain
in the artist, the viewer might experience pleasure, no bad thing in itself, but a successful painting
should also transmit the pain of the creative process to the voyeur, for such to a greater or lesser
extent is the beholder. He then admitted to the constant presence of a ‘monster’ named ‘doubt’
A Personal Memoir l Eoin O’Brien 135