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

that watched over his every brush stroke and made him wonder if anything he painted was worth
a damn. Indeed, as I later recalled, he had identified the monster at a much earlier period in his
career: “All artists are subject to periods of doubt, however, and I was no exception. It came
suddenly; the painting was rubbish I felt, however well received; these silent surreal wastelands,
these mute bones and raven skies – who was I addressing? Of what relevance these Arcadian
shores to a world of blackmail and bombs?”
Apart from the autobiographical catharsis that I saw in these paintings, I think I identified
another quality I had seen also in Beckett’s writing, and which I had earlier expressed: “With this
realisation comes another; much of the apparently surrealistic in Beckett’s writing is linked,
sometimes very positively, sometimes only tenuously, with the reality of existence, and much of
this existence emanates from memories of Dublin, a world rendered almost unrecognisable by
Beckett’s technique of denuding his landscape and its people (while also annihilating time) in his
creation of the ‘unreality of the real’.” 2 Was Johnson not expressing similar sentiments when he
wrote: “I spy psychiatrists and neurologists waiting in the wings. Let them come to the podium
and state their case. Rupert Sheldrake, for instance, writes of time and space-denying chreodes
bearing atavistic messages from a deep primeval code through morphogenetic fields which determine
our behaviour – and write our songs. Should I sit at this man’s feet and thus quench the
incandescent magic? I’m not denying the role of intellect; with it we can build a frame on which
2. O’Brien E. The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland. Black Cat Press and Faber and Faber. Dublin. 1986. P. xix
136 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
Golgotha
A Personal Memoir l Eoin O’Brien 137