www.kingerlee.com

John Kingerlee

Born 1936, Birmingham, England.

Educated at "Winslade" The Marist College, Clyst St Mary Nr Exeter, England.

1962 - 1982 Cornwall

1982 West Cork

John now lives and works on BEARA in Cork with his wife Mo.

Dominic and I went to school with John at "Winslade".  Even in those days he had a precocious talent and was destined for great artistic things.  Johns early work reflected the magic and mythology of Celtic Cornwall where he lived and worked for many years.  John had an early love of the abstract and had an admiration for the work of Paul Klee.  Our Family have owned many of Johns works over the years and have them on the walls of our homes.

THIS IS AN EARLY PEN AND INK FROM THE 60'S

All these Paintings BELOW are available to see on the net at the http://www.leinstergallery.com/artists/jkingerlee/index.htm 

John Kingerlee has chosen to live, with his wife Mo, on the Beara peninsula. Beara, how the world resonates it echoes with bear, in the naked sense, which it is; and even the animal makes sense in the context, big, dark, fascinating and unpredictable. In Irish it is derived from point, something sharp, undoubtedly a topographical word, like so many in Irish, describing the lie of the land. It could also be cognate with an old Irish word for water, which is indeed apt for this ancient and very beautiful peninsula. The name Beara has other mythical resonances, it was supposedly the name of the King of Spain's daughter who was given in marriage to Eoghan Mor, King of Munster, c. 200 AD. After spending nine years in Spain, having been defeated by Conn of the Hundred Battles, he returned, landed north of Bantry bay and named the harbour after his new wife: Bearhaven.

Beara is spectacular and most particular, on this earth it is, like everywhere we might name unique. John and his wife live on the northern jaw of Beara, on the edge, hung up as if some large bird's nest, looking across Kenmare bay to the humbling reaches of Kerry's main mountains. Looking west is out to the vast Atlantic with the Skelligs standing sharply angled, dark silhouettes against the sun. Kingerlee has become part of this landscape, he has grown in to it, he has permeated it with a keen eye and an intense affection. He perceives and feels the very pith and presence of it all. 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.

John Kingerlee was born in Birmingham in 1936. He has Irish ancestors on his mother's side who were Hogans from Cork direct descendents 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 1950's 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 Penninsula in West cork where he and Mo still live. He had numerous exhibitions in Dublin with the Tom Caldwell Gallery. He is now represented by The Leinster Gallery where his last two shows have sold out. Exhibitions are also planned for New York, Dallas, Paris, Tokyo, Cork and Belfast.

John Kingerlee is one of the leading artists in Ireland. His meditative, intellectual work combined with his wonderful sense of colour brings great joy to the viewer seeing his work for the first time. His figurative work owes a debt to Jorn, Appel, Corneille, Braque and Dubuffet and his colour is as wonderful as, Klee and Nolde. The artist has never tried to imitate the great but has forged his own unique style. 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 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. Hi s 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 " Idon'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 free's 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 astonishing 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; he is tune with his movements. 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 it's 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. 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, myriad's 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.

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.

I witnessed on memorable day the signing of a finished Kingerlee painting - It was a privilege to be present to witness a great artists final mark on canvas. - The final mark was made with great integrity, honesty and a humbling on his part as his wife Mo encouraged him to sign after many week of doubting and more doubting - It is finished John she said with encouragement - I knew then I was in the privileged company of a true Artisan.

~Rita Kelly, poet & writer

Like the 19th century symbolist poets, Kingerlee uses his art to identify correspondences between the inner world of thoughts, feelings and ideas, and the outer world of recognisable forms and spaces. He internalises his diverse experiences, digests them and allows them to stay dormant for years, if not decades, before deciding to re-examine them through the medium of his work.

At various times over the last forty- five years he has lived the life of a nomad, the exile and the hermit. The experiences and memories he has stored up stretch back to his earliest years when he was looked after by his aunt in London who trained horses for the circus (His earliest memories are of the circus, although with the advent of war his family moved to Exeter). A non-conformist by nature, he chose to go his own way in life as in art, always upholding firsthand experience over secondary sources of knowledge. Early employment included working with his hands as a gardener, helping children with learning difficulties at several Rudolf Steiner homes, and managing an organic flower mill.

It will come as no surprise that as an artist he was self-taught, turning to painting from poetry in 1962. This is one of the few securely dateable events of Kingerlee's unconventional lifeline. The other which should be mentioned is the move from England to Ireland in 1982, which at last ushered in a period of stability. When he settled on the northern 'jaw' of the Beara peninsula, in a house looking out across Kenmare Bay to the mountains of Kerry, he was in one sense returning to his roots, for his mother was a Hogan from Cork. Beara's enticing mixture of sea, mountains and unbroken solitude finally quelled his wanderlust, at the same time opening up the floodgates of artistic inspiration.

So what is it that triggers Kingerlee's creative energy? Someone who thinks and feels as deeply as he does will have their senses constantly alert, tuned into a whole range of wavelengths rather than just one channel. The spark might be a poignant memory, a change in the weather or the colour of the sea, a cathartic moment caught on the silver screen, a 'found' postage stamp or magazine clipping, or even some graffiti that impressed him because of the dangers encountered by its maker.

The process he goes through is one of exchange or dialogue between interior and exterior. Sometimes the means at his disposal may seem unconnected, puzzling even, and one of the thrills of getting to grips with his art is to gradually peel back the layers. A classic example of his powers of association and transformation is a miniature picture gallery consisting of nine old cardboard tickets from the London Underground. How or why he kept them is anybody's guess, gut kept them he did for over twenty years, eventually turning them into a series of miniature heads and figures. Kingerlee seldom offers us verbal explanations, but on this occasion he provided some clues in a letter:

"the old London Transport Underground tickets….mark a time when I was living in a squat -Grafton Way, up the back of Warren Street Station...I was in a basement room and sometimes in the night in bed I could hear the trains far beneath in the earth. A house for poor young musicians. So lots of music day and night. 3 storey Georgian building. At the top a large grouping of "gays". Many of em now dead: Aids. The tickets themselves are antiques now. New technology ousted them. They're very charming little pieces of cardboard"

It is striking how these tiny little heads confront the viewer with all the poignancy of the larger heads which form a significant portion of Kingerlee's output. In fact, his obsession with the frontally observed head rivals that of artists such as Giacometti and Dubuffet. But he does not have the existentialist take of the former, or the faux naïf style of the latter. A more appropriate comparison perhaps would be with the work of Georges Rouault, specially the many heads and figures of Christ which the French painter produced.

Rouault's Christ is, above all else, a man of sorrows - an indictment and reminder of all the hurt and suffering that is in the world. Kingerlee's heads also fulfill this function, emerging from a fractured universe to stare innocently back at the viewer:

"My heads are as anonymous as any person going down the street in Ireland - my heads have landscapes and figures in them…. I see the whole journey of a life within the surface of these works.'

The end of this quote indicates that the heads also contain an element of self-portraiture, not in the literal sense of the word but rather as a kind of a silent witness, imbued with stillness and timelessness, innocent yet strangely knowing.

A similar quality of stillness inhabits Kingerlee's landscapes, which hover tantalisingly on the boundary between reality and abstraction. As in all his work the physical activation of their surfaces bears witness to the animus of the painter, in the same way that graffiti-covered hoardings evoke the immediacy of their makers. But kingerlee's textures stop short of being brash, self-proclaiming gestures. Instead they strike one as having grown directly out of the stuff of nature itself - out of the rocks and earth, the waves and the clouds that he wakes up to every day at Kilcatherine. The heavily layered oil paint is actually handled with immense sensitivity and skill, the sensuous accretions suggesting forms rather than describing them

scanned but item too large for scanner 1965 acrylic on flotsam balsawood

.

An indefiniteness of shape and form is, of course, to some extent ingrained in the marginal character of the two peninsulas the painter has lived on - Cornwall and Beara. Surrounded on all sides by the elements, he recreates spaces that we can enter mentally as well as visually, in a way that seem to have no parallels in contemporary art. Kingerlee has, in effect, reinvented pictorial landscape as both a multi-sensory and meditative experience, for his pictures are imbued with the smell and feel as well as the colours of the fragile beauty surrounding him.

~Jonathan Benington, Curator of the Victoria Gallery, Bath, UK and expert on Roderick O'Connor

John Kingerlee the artist as a young man wanted more than anything to be a poet and a writer but in order to put food on the table for his young family he became a successful gardener for a time before he embarked on a career of painting.

A few years ago John wrote a poem out for me and this is part of it:

"And in the mountains
when I asked - are you afraid of dying
To my surprise -
He burst out laughing
In 99 years
All living creatures shall be dead
Should all the world then he said be afraid
Is that not ridiculous?
Alone Alone
Always Alone
Lonely in childhood
Down to the bone
And I wonder who put flowers
On my fathers grave,
My mother asked if it was me
Now she too is gone
And there is none between
The grave and me."

We first met in Galway back in 1983, or thereabouts. It was not long afterwards that I found myself walking the long track, high above the sea, at the far end of the Beara peninsula. Their house on the rocky slope edged the mist and stood next to where others had fallen. This was not a place that had ever known the convenience of the industrial age. There was a roof and walls and there was warmth and welcome. Otherwise there were the elements that can be formidable on those fronts.

We had an overlap in our experiences - a love for wild places on these islands, but also the normal encounters with the underbelly of the wasteland of modern urban England. We both in one way or another, had art in the bones and a whiff of the serious clown's view of the world.

When he came to show me his paintings, I was struck by an atmosphere in them which was extraordinarily beautiful and which I at first presumed would be transient, it was so subtle or refined. Now beauty is a word that is thrown around and used with great ease but the true quality, almost beyond aesthetics, is really quite rare. One thing I do know is that in spite of all effort, you cannot posses or own it. Fairy stories have told us this, of course, which helps to dismiss the idea, but it is true.

The man himself was wiry, quick - fire, volatile. I knew something of the nature of his circumstances. I also knew that this wasn't art that rested in comfortable anchor points. It was a mixture of hard excavation and allowing butterflies to settle on the fingertips. You couldn't know how long those quantities would shimmer in the day light before the wind would blow the sand back over the digging and send iridescent wings fluttering far away into the depths of the sky.

Since those days they have found a slightly more secure shelter further into the Kenmare River. I have been honored with shared food, good thought and stringent debate. I have visited when the spaces have been clear and I have called in when there have been paintings everywhere…paintings propped up in corners, on shelves, against walls, behind the store, placed on the laundry rack and busy at the table, themselves like conversing visitors it became clear, in abundance, that distinctive atmosphere that I observed, so beautiful and so transient, is a presence that emerges again and again in John Kingerlee's paintings.

There are many ways for a painter to step into a work. The image can be fully formed in the imagination before any gesture has made contact with the empty surface. It can be held there (or before the eyes) all the way to the paintings completion. Another way however, is to allow the first gesture to speak back to the imagination, and then the next and the next and so on, until a focus, in what is truly a kind of conversation, is searched. If it was a chaos of 'accidents there wouldn't be a consistency of association atmosphere in the best examples of this kind of working, nor, for that matter, would the artist find it so rewarding to continue along this path. The conversation is one between the materials and the intent free association of the artist's sensibility and with the imagination. At each step there are choices to be made, but also aspects revealed. I choose not to use the word 'subconscious' because there are too many loose associations there with a semi-science, presumptuous analysis and various forms of control. Rather an inner landscape, which is more to do with myth, opens up a place approached with a kind of humility where exploration and revelation are possible.

This is something like John's approach. Spend some time with his painting and you find yourself, in the richness of his near but - not - quite abstraction in shifting worlds that mirror our own floating world.

This is a painting that involves a poetic imagination. A consistent presence in John's painting in recent decades has been his signing his painting with a little glyph of a boatman. This emerged from paintings he did in Cornwall in the 1960's of a fisherman pulling in the catch.

For me the little figure, before I knew this, had associations with a ferryman on a pilgrim. They are all close in feeling. An earl teacher of Christianity in Northern England was asked by a powerful man to describe what is life. He replied that it is like a sparrow flying in from the dark into a feasting hall and then out again through the door. Jesus says, in the 'Gospel of Thomas; 'Be a passing through'. Some of the art of the past reflects this spirit - the great scrolls of China and Japan and the 16th century Northern European 'Landscapes of the world in which the Kaleidoscope of creation comes into being and subsides again. The participant (weather artist or viewer) passes through like a pilgrim, a ferryman crossing from bank to bank, or a fisherman seeking insight like glistening fish in the net.

This is one way of approaching beauty in transience that I saw when I first encountered John's paintings. There are other approaches as you walk streets, takes busses, subway trains, pass buildings that are replacing other buildings, you can see layers of time being replaced, but the new façade is never complete. Hoardings that need to be replaced old ones become ripped to reveal not just the previous one, but maybe several ancestors all with different now fragmented voices. John's paintings often have several almost transparent layers to them, sometimes concealing sometimes revealing. Out of the mirage come figures and places.

There is no nostalgia for pasts that are gone. This is not an attitude that looks particularly backwards or forwards but pauses now with a kind of wonder at the play of the flow of time, and deeper longing to be sustained in and beyond this truly strange matter of being alive.

~Gillian Watson, writer & painter and former curator of the Ulster Museum

EDMUND FORTE        friend and admirer

The first major work of art that I was ever aware of John completing was at school. 

John had painted a most colourful fantastic bird of his imagination as a piece of schoolwork.  I had never seen anything like it before, he merrily called it an Elephant bird to puzzle me and I suspect to amuse him.  the drawing had been coloured with every colour of the spectrum (as I saw it) and the colours were expertly melded into one another to present (in those dull and dreary post war years) a most wonderful piece of work that I have never forgotten, I can still picture it in my mind now.

Over the years of his budding apprenticeship as an artist my family "The Forte Family of Exeter" supported John by buying his work and giving him all the love and friendship and encouragement that we could.  Edmund & Dominic Forte 2003.