John Kingerlee



We sometimes toy with the question, what must it have been for the friends of Van Gogh or Gauguin, friends of greatness if you like, to have known them, walked with them, to have been with them. I sense in knowing John Kingerlee I have an answer, for I sense I have a friendship with and an awareness of a man apart, perhaps the greatest living European artist of the modern age. John Kingerlee is unique. He is unique as a man who has sought solitude and creative space at the edge of land and life. Kingerlee's work places him at the end of the land of Europe. The mountains and the ocean frame his living and the world of wild creatures surrounding is laid out at his doorstep. Kingerlee creates landscapes within landscapes, in a seemingly never-ending symphony of visual excitement; the work grows in the viewing. It is as though the pigments have been laid down, vein upon rich vein, and await the pallet knife and brush of the artist. In his building up of colour, form and texture, Kingerlee seems to sculpt almost, to cut into that which is already there. It is not, of course already there, it just seems so.

John is possessed of an amazing technique. He is an artisan of the brush and the knife, a man rough and gentle all in the one. Rugged, elemental work is the product of his unique creativity, but there too in the hidden imagery of the canvases, there is a gentleness; heads, faces, figures, observing and moving towards the viewer out of the fissures, the rocks and crevasses of the Kingerlee landscape. The hidden images are everywhere. Kingerlee knows nothing of their origin. They are almost, messages from another world, another space, another place deep within the mind of the artist, laid down over the years of his living, by the experiences good and bad that make him the man he is today. The work is rich, vibrant, highly textural, demanding to be held, embraced, walked into and experienced. The richness is beyond compare, without equal in modern European art. I sense I have met a genius.

Rowan Hand, Writer and Broadcaster