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John
Shinnors: Estuary in February - 4, 2001,
conté on paper,
36 x 36 cm; courtesy Crawford Municipal Gallery
of Modern Art
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John Shinnors
has been showing his work in two separate exhibitions
in Cork City this spring: one at the Vangard Gallery in
Carey's Lane and the other at the Crawford Municipal Gallery
in Emmet Place.
Arriving
at the Crawford exhibition, you climb the Corban Walker
staircase up to the first-floor gallery and emerge to
face the huge, impressive panel of Scarecrow portraits.
They are about three-foot square and there are eighteen
of them double-hung in two lines of nine. They impressively
span the width of the gallery. Virtually all the colour
you will find in the show has been poured into these portraits.
They evoke the skull, the face, perhaps even notions of
the self-portrait, but, predominantly, the mask.
They are
loaded with allusions to agriculture and the land - and
not just in the scarecrow titles. In one painting the
mask/head is concocted through an image of a corrugated
metal sheet, in another it is fashioned from a cow-hide,
in yet another what could be a ploughed field backdrops
two flag-like heads, one black, one white, that flap -
although they don't - like Goya banners. There are hints
of macabre humour, echoes even of agrarian violence and
sometimes a simmering unnameable threat staring out at
you through these empty heads. There are even deadly jokes:
a fragment of a red circle with a diagonal slash painted
over the part-image of a crow, beside the half-head of
Mr Scarecrow.
In two of
the paintings in the series the heads are left to float
against the empty linen of the 'canvas', almost like two
cut-out masks of paint that have been collaged onto the
bare fabric. One of them looks as if it has been painted
from an actual model mask, made quickly out of a sheet
of white paper - it glows with its own interior light;
its hollow head looks into our world from some other place.
There is something of the ancestral effigy or totem about
these scarecrow heads - something unsettling, like the
hovering presence of the dead that lurks behind the Halloween
pumpkin's grin. These paintings relate most directly to
the artist's earlier works, with their subtly negotiated
gothic sensibility.
A keen interest
in masks seems appropriate for a painter like John Shinnors,
with his mysterious acts of showing things and simultaneously
hiding things in the images he makes. When you encounter
these images you enter a world of camouflage, of light
and dark - a world of visual hide-and-seek - things half-shown,
things half-hidden - revealed and simultaneously cloaked
- everything that is given is given only in glimpses.
A real, tangible,
experienced-through-the-senses world of fact and feeling
is there in these works - all the time - but it is reframed
and refocused, brought into collision and ultimately into
collusion with the practices of Abstract Painting. This
artist reclaims that activity from purely formal concerns
and puts it to the service of expressing his personal,
feelingful response to a familiar, lived world around
him, a world that is retrievable from the images. In the
process a kind of visual magic takes place.
There are
sixty-three individual works in this show that have been
thoughtfully and very effectively arranged into four larger
panels of works, each of which commands one of the four
walls of the first-floor gallery at the Crawford. To my
mind the hanging is a great success and is one of the
best that I have seen in what can be, whilst it is a fascinating
space, an unsympathetic space for paintings. Here the
exhibition takes on the space and wins.
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John
Shinnors: Over Loop, August, oil on linen,
30 x 30 cm; courtesy Vangard Gallery
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The two themes
explored in the works are the landscape of the Shannon
Estuary and the previously mentioned Scarecrows; each
is explored through both paintings and drawings.
The twenty-eight Estuary Drawings are double-hung in a
block; fourteen on top and fourteen below, and face across
the width of the first-floor gallery to the wall that
holds the five large Estuary Paintings. These are about
five feet square. The bank of twelve Scarecrow Portrait
Drawings fill the innermost wall of the gallery and face
across the length of the room to the large, free-standing,
'billboard' wall on which the eighteen Scarecrow Portrait
Paintings are hung. These large, impressive blocks of
works call to each other across the space of the room
and I found myself frequently turning from the drawing
walls to look back over my shoulder to the related paintings.
This is a smaller show than its first incarnation at the
Limerick City Gallery earlier in the year, and being able
to hang it in one room has enabled it to become more focused
and concentrated, allowing the works to really display
their memorable strengths.
In contrast
to the spooky humour of the Scarecrow Portraits, there
is a quiet, unobtrusive, pared-down poetry in the Estuary
Drawings. They are made with conté and faint stains of
diluted black watercolour or ink. Each one is about thirty
by thirty centimetres. In them the landscape is sliced
into glimpses and into fragments of forms and fragments
of attention. There are one or two almost 'straight' landscapes
embedded in the set - and in some of the drawings the
paper is divided up into quarters to carry four smaller
images. You wander back and forth over this wall of images,
across its rhythms of half-recognised shapes, building
up a sense of the wide open, light-filled spaces of the
estuary landscape.
Shinnors
really likes drawing - he's told me so. He has always
made drawings and he values the activity highly. You can
sense that it seeps into his ever more subdued and subtle
palette as a painter. In both these shows in Cork this
deeply subtle, not-quite-monochrome palette, is a powerful
feature.
It is a real
delight to be able to see an exhibition of a major, contemporary
Irish painter - and a painter at yet further heights of
his powers - that includes his drawings; indeed, to see
a show where the drawings are afforded an equal importance
to the painted works. More shows should do this. Whereas
the paintings are relatively large - powerful tonal intrigues
of light-and-dark theatre - the drawings are small and
intimate and at a sketchbook-scale. They are however clearly
not preliminary sketches, but rather finished works in
their own right (previous sketches may even have preceded
them - I don't know). They hold their own here, operating
at a different level from the paintings and speaking in
a different, but equally powerful voice. If the five large
Estuary Paintings have something of the voice of opera
- the drawings are like birdsong.
The paintings
on show in the Vangard Gallery in Carey's Lane are the
same scale as the small Estuary Drawings in the Crawford
and deal with the same river and landscape theme. There
is also a triptych of images exhibited that deal with
another favourite Shinnors' theme: the Swallows.
This show
of small paintings is a true diamond of an exhibition.
There is the same reduced, almost monochrome palette of
lights and darks at work here: greys, blacks and whites,
with a little tint of colour warming a grey here, or muddying
a white there - the images glowing with a reflected water-light.
These beautiful
paintings share something of the intimacy of the drawings
in the Crawford show and test out some of the drawing
ideas further in paint (like, for example, dividing the
canvas up into four even smaller, self-contained images).
They are Minimal, spare and elegant - little landscape
haikus.
Seeing both
of these very strong shows you come away with the feeling
that this painter is a true individual, who has cut his
own path, regardless of prevailing fashions, trusting
his own instincts and pursuing his own very powerful and
poetic vision.
Jim Savage
is an artist and a lecturer in art.
John Shinnors:
Crawford Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Cork, February
- April 2003; John Shinnors: Small Paintings Vangard Gallery,
Cork, February/March 2003
Article reproduced from CIRCA
104, Summer 2003, pp.86-87.
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