Galleries

GARDENS

As a city dweller, the wildness of untended corners of urban gardens has attracted me as a source of significant subject matter. All the pictures in the selection below were painted in the gardens of friends, who have been prepared to put up with my presence on their properties, often for months on end, making these works possible.

Painting Lenten Rose, watercolour.
Eric Satie’s Gnossienne played by guitarists Gerard Cousins & Yusuf B’layachi

NORMANDY PLANTSCAPES

In Normandy, as in Britain, my works were dependant on the goodwill of people prepared to put up with my presence on their properties for months at a time.

Pyrénées-Orientales

Human Beings

I have always made drawings or paintings of people around me, and this selection is a small fraction of them. As with any other painting or drawing from life, one finds a ‘likeness’, an ‘aura’ or ‘feeling’ unique to the the place, the occasion and the person. It was Julia Auerbach, née Wolstenholme, a tutor at Hornsey Art College in the 1960s, who alerted me to this all-important ‘feeling’ element. Moments spent drawing or painting people have a special quality unlike any other human interaction.

CLICK TO VIEW ENLARGED IMAGES:

SELF PORTRAITS

Like a lot of artists I’ve taken advantage of myself as a readily available subject, so there are quite a few of these. The earliest is from 1962. (See also https://johnnpearceartist.com/self-portrait-in-a-garden/ )

CLICK TO VIEW ENLARGED IMAGES:

Archive – Miscellanious Paintings

After leaving college in 1964, like many would-be painters, I became a full-time teacher, but continued painting and exhibiting work. I found my impulse was to reject any self-conscious approach, be it modernist or traditional, and to make an obvious and recognisable response to what I saw, sometimes, admittedly, becoming a bit conventional. But finding oneself able to paint at all can be rewarding, particularly if people respond by buying one’s work, and, apart from the value of “keeping one’s hand in”, one does also also question what one is doing as a painter, and why. Painting itself asserts its own imperatives, sometimes mysterious or seemingly arbitrary, and becomes more absorbing, intense and difficult.

This gallery includes early and later works, and shows varying degrees of these stages. Some were the product of a single session, others much more than brief studies. Some are more and some less serious or important than others, and of varying success.

Drawings, Studies, Sketches.

Few of my drawings are finished pieces in their own right, most are notes or mementos. Since my painting process amounts to explorational drawing in paint, I seldom make preliminary studies for them. But I continue to sketch, often at times of change or approaching new subject-matter. The activity is literally one of marking time.