John Kingerlee
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John Kingerlee (born 1936) is an Irish artist currently living on the Beara peninsula, in west Cork.
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[edit] Career
[edit] Early life
John Kingerlee was born in Birmingham in 1936. He has Irish ancestors on his mother's side who were Hogans from Cork direct descendants of the Wedgwood family. The family left Birmingham when John was six weeks old and moved to London between Richmond and Cromwell Road where his father managed a gentleman's poker club before the Second World War. His aunt Anna looked after John.
She was a horse trainer who broke and trained horses for the circus - John's earliest memory was as a two year old playing under the belly of a dangerous horse who was my friend and was being trained for Bertram Mills circus. "I remember my aunt pleading with me to come out but I didn't want to leave my friend.
Aunty Anna's boyfriend then was Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. And they wanted to adopt John but with the advent of war the Fairbanks went to Hollywood and John's parents went to Exeter were the young man was sent to be educated by The Marist Fathers. His favorite teachers at the school were Father's Morrisey and Murphy who were both a great help to the rebellious youngster who was illiterate until he was eleven years old.
In the late 1950s he met his wife Mo and they have five grown up children. John had aspirations to be a poet and writer but to provide bread for the table he became gardener growing vegetables and flowers. He worked for the next few years in the Rudolf Steiner homes teaching children with learning difficulties gardening in three separate homes in Gloucestershire and kept writing poetry. In 1960 they moved to Yorkshire and John managed an organic flour mill. In 1962 they moved to Warwickshire and he started painting. At this time he worked in a nursery growing vegetables and flowers. John rose at 4 am every morning and painted until 6am before he went to work. It was in 1962 he decided to become a full time artist. A painting entitled "Lovers" survives from this period.
The family then moved to Cornwall near Mevagissey where John continued to paint. He had his first solo exhibition at the Ewan Phillips Gallery in London in 1967 and during this time he traveled to Spain and Morocco. He continued to stay in Cornwall with regular trips to London until 1982. John and Mo traveled to Ireland that year and finally settled on The Beara Peninsula in West cork where he and Mo still live. He has had numerous exhibitions in Dublin with the Tom Caldwell Gallery and Leinster Gallery.
[edit] Current life and works
John and his wife live on the northern jaw of Beara, looking across Kenmare bay to Kerry's main mountains. His studio hangs out even further than the house itself, leaning out to take full advantage of the views, not afraid of the angle, or the constant crashing of the waves beneath. These same waves pour over a rock outcrop creating a mélange of colour and texture, vivid yellow, the brown of all the peat compressed above and below, the most blinding pure white of the foam, the blues and greens and steely greys of the sea and the skies as they mix and intermingle. These patterns of complex colour and texture change and rearrange themselves every other moment in a rhythmic movement driven by the wind, the tide and the light.
Kingerlee finds an expression for all this - well his life as an artist is about searching for an expression for all this. It is his own interpretation, his own distinctive reading and translating of what he feels and smells and hears and tastes and imagines. He does it with huge energy, lots of paint, big build ups and constructs of paints, very fond of the palette knife, even the trowel, to get enough paint on there so we have a true sense of what it really feels like, of how there are huge areas of unadulterated white untouched in zinc and silver surrounds. It is as if he hasn't time out of breath, of course he is, there is so much happening in this landscape, all the time, perhaps since time immemorial, forever changing, forever reshaping itself, so that he gives us not just an abstract of what he sees, but reduces it further to visual algebraic terms.
Kingerlee's meditative, intellectual work combined with his use of colour brings great joy to the viewer seeing his work for the first time. His figurative work recalls Jorn, Appel, Corneille, Braque and Dubuffet, and his use of colour, Paul Klee and Nolde. Just like Tony O'Malley and Louis Le Brocquy he never went to art school, preferring to learn, constantly studying the great of the past. Kingerlee throws academic cultures out the window[citation needed]and is like a childhood rediscovered with all its freshness and dreams. He seeks inspiration from the primitive peoples with their totems and magic signs and from the culture of folk art, naïve art and above all, the art of children[citation needed]. His work literally fizzles with energy as if seen through the eyes of a child creating friendly innocent like beings (did he teach some of these children gardening) goblins and animals from a cosmic world. His earliest memories were from the world of the circus. There is no threat here, just a positive message of hope and optimism. In his landscape paintings he is a master of The Beara landscape. These luminous abstracts Landscapes sometimes with heads included show a re-awakening of the pure genius of Patrick Collins. For kingerlee the material is the paint itself. Interviewed recently Kingerlee stated " I don't like to tie people down to specific images - I like the viewer to see their own pictures. The picture itself is like a movie which changes and moves. Monday s landscape is very different from Wednesdays. Modern life to-day can be a very lonely existence so I like my landscape's to be viewed, especially if someone is ill in bed I dearly hope my painting would be a good companion to them."
The artist paints many miniature Klee like composition's "It is a delight for me to work on such a large number of miniatures at the same time - It frees one from the oppression of the ego - one's meddling oppressive ego doesn't have a choice to deaden the joy and vitality of the work - Shall I put that here shall I put that there - I am like a boxer painting from the self conscious effort to unconscious spontaneity.
In his head paintings Kingerlee paints from his inner experience with conviction - His imagery express powerfully and magnificently the truth of the human heart and with great compassion. The works are inspirational, completed with masterly elegance and are deeply challenging to the viewer - "my heads are as anonymous as any person going down any street in Ireland. - My heads have landscapes and figures in them - whether it is a bird or a lady pushing a pram - it is the head that emerges - I find it difficult to talk about my art - paintings should speak for themselves - I don't always know what they are saying".
John Kingerlee hears his landscape[citation needed]; he is tune with his movements[citation needed]. The overt and the measurable movements of course, but more particularly, all that moves and shapes out of the world out of hearing, out of seeing. It is not just the deep, low sounding, imperceptible movements of the earth from its core to its crust that he hears sees and imagines, but he hears the wind and he hears the clouds, the sea-breakers and the tide on its turn. He hears it all in colour.
He hears the delicate tones of the elements as they speak themselves from the confines of ancient rocks[citation needed]. Sulphur, iron, zinc, silver, copper and so forth, he hears the schists and the silicates in their bright sibilance. In fact it becomes difficult to distinguish between faculty and hearing and the faculty of seeing in the case of Kingerlee. There is no marked separation of the senses with him - he touches and feels the texture of the rock, rough and smooth, he smells the damp and smells the rain upon the heavier winds, he tastes the flecks of invisible salt upon the winds as they whip up and lick the limbs of Beara.
John Kingerlee gives up his landscapes, so fresh we can almost smell the paint from them. He has heads and portraits, myriads of them, so like his landscape, striated with vivid colours and tones, dark or blank eyes, the gaze is often down turned concentrated and very delicate. Sometimes these heads and portraits are stricken with emotion shown through colour and the downward rend of the line. There are deep pools of colour on his work, red brick reds, molten silver and zinc, platinum and titanium, sulphuric yellows and so much more. There are shapes hovering about the umbra and penumbra, there are the deified souls of the dead, there are the bright animated Hues of the living and there is Kingerlee's sensitivity holding it all together in folds and figures of an ever-changing world.
Birmingham, England.
A new department over the past five years for Kingerlee has been his grids and Rub Back paintings -The artist spiritually shines through in a very profound way in these works. Unlike his drawings, water colours and mixed media works which have an undercurrent of humour and skillful deployment of line and which are complimented with intense rapidity and sureness, these grids and Rub Backs are painted over a very long period of time. The finished work has a quiet nobility solitude and respect, qualities which apply to the artist himself.
Some of the Grids paintings are the fascination of looking at old and ancient walls - Blackshaw whom he admires hold the same fascination for walls - The artist visits Fez in Morocco every year and it is the old and ancient walls of the old city which inspires some of his Grids - In his own words "Walls with their bullet holes and the white wash that has been eroded here and there - here there is graffiti - graffiti on graffiti - posters are ripped and peeled back leaving portions of their original image - a film stars face - a notice of an auction or a meeting - stains of birds dung are there - the history and humanity of this part of the city begins to emerge and after a period of maybe twelve months the painting is finished and then the viewer witnesses a work of great humanity painted by someone who loves the city.
Most of his Rub Back paintings are on a very small scale but the smallness does not effect their internal greatness. Some of these Rub Backs have emerged from the memory of a visit to Campden town and Tottenham Court road underground stations in London en route to a visit to India in 1986. The artist photographed the graffiti on billboards. "I was really taken back by the courage of the graffiti artist who put themselves in dangerous situations when crossing the line to make an artistic expression - I was also fascinated by the billboards themselves with their layer upon layer of pigment." After sixteen years I have resurrected some of these memories as one of the components for my Rub Backs.
The billboards have become a process of going back through time and new images emerge. "The horse seems to have a gigantic head in the sitting room where men are having discussions - beneath them birds fly across a background of print. - Is it a fish in the sky? In the corner is the remnant of a Coca Cola poster, - I see the whole journey of my life within the surface of these works. - As a child I had the greatest collection of American comic strips in the south of England- Captain Marvel and Dick Tracey and all the favorites were in the collection and they were eventually lost in a fire many years later. - These little boxes contained many images but then they became more abstract as the Rub Back continues. They became more anonymous with random events of the day. Even though I don't watch television I have a passion for film - I am not thinking Marilyn Monroe - It's what emerges from the paint."
Bishop Michael Jackson a great admirer of Kingerlee's work comments on his singular signature. " His logo points in his paintings to his involvement in their subject. The artist, representative Individual, paddles his own canoe in the face of this drama of colour and idea. "The canoe for forty years now has floated through the rivers of life and despite many turbulent waters the artist has charted the true course of the artisan - many broader horizons await this great artist as his work descends on a whole new world.
In 2006, Kingerlee exhibited works in Ireland, England and The United States of America. Many of the 2006 exhibitions were sold out and Kingerlee recieved much attention in The United states. Art critic William Zimmer gave a speech about the artist and his works at the Los Angeles exhibition curated by Masoud Pourhabib.
In 2006 his "Grid Composition" was sold in Sotheby's Auctioneer's on 15th Nov 2006 (Lot 462) in New York for USD$156,000 (GBP£82,591 / EUR€121,788 approx) inc. buyer's premium.
