ABOUT THE ARTIST

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
John Kingerlee was born in Birmingham, UK in 1936, and grew up in London, reared in the poker club managed by his father and in the circus run by the club’s owners. Kingerlee had an early interest in art, which was encouraged when he attended a boarding school in Exeter, run by the Marist Fathers. As a student he was also drawn to modern literature, reading voraciously, and considered becoming a writer. Instead, Kingerlee turned to visual art, and began his strikingly independent path as a self-taught artist. During his first years as an artist, he would paint in the early mornings, before going to work. His jobs included working at a bike factory, in the garden of a special needs school, and managing an organic flour mill. In 1962, Kingerlee and his wife Mo moved to Cornwall, where they lived for the next twenty years.

Kingerlee’s early representational paintings were influenced by Surrealism, especially the work of Dalí. Kingerlee has acknowledged an affinity to a core group of artists: Kurt Schwitters, the Dada master of collage, Braque and Picasso, (the co-originators of Cubism), Paul Klee, and Asger Jorn, in whose energized imagistic work we can see a direct kinship with Kingerlee’s own paintings. The American Abstract Expressionists Pollock and de Kooning are both highly regarded by him for their gestural, painterly invention.

Kingerlee’s first exhibition was held in 1967 at the Ewan Maddox Gallery in London, and in 1968 he had two exhibitions, including one at the Walton Gallery. The next year he made his first visit to Fez, Morocco, whose atmosphere and particularly whose walls would come to have a strong presence in his paintings. Beginning in 2000, he began yearly three-month stays there. In the 1970s, Kingerlee started making pottery, and began using his personal sign of a man in a boat (visible with his signature on paintings) to symbolize the artist following his own path. That spirit of self-reliance was manifested in 1982 when he moved with his wife to the wild and remote Beara Peninsula in the West Cork area of Ireland, first to Cleanagh and then to Kilcatherine, where they have lived since 1990.

Beara’s wind-blown landscape of rock, sky, and water has had a deep effect on Kingerlee’s work, and his painting captures its essence in nearly abstract form. He works slowly on paintings, which may take years to complete. He also produces collages, which involve found printed matter and drawing, and figurative paintings, including an ongoing series of heads. Kingerlee’s abstract grids reflect both the walls of Fez and the artist’s devotion to the mystical Sufi branch of Islam.

The new millennium saw a great upsurge in recognition of Kingerlee’s work, with exhibitions in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, New York, and Dallas. In 2006, an exhibition is planned for Montreal, a television documentary on Kingerlee’s life and work will air, and a book by Jonathan Benington on the artist’s oeuvre, with 250 reproductions, has been published by Nicholson and Bass.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT
The current body of work consists of landscapes, collages, paintings with figures and animals, including a series of heads, and abstract grid paintings.

The landscapes are painted in oil, in many layers, and are often worked on over many years. They are landscapes, but they are also abstract pictures; you can see them as you wish. 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. The grid paintings are very important to me. I’d like to make many more of the white ones, very quiet soothing paintings. That’s what we need in these times, something peaceful.

Drawing is an essential part of developing this work. Sometimes, it is automatic, but at a certain stage thought can be required. Things grow out of scribbles. One can take oneself by surprise. If you work, work, work, your normal consciousness disappears and it is almost like another person, I like to think a more creative person, who is working using intuition to a much greater degree.

In the process of working, sometimes you can get it wrong and another thing happens and that thing can be good too. I love to work with what they call chance, cutting down on conscious choice, letting things arrive at where they wish–keeping oneself out of it as much as possible by not making conscious choices. So all the way down the line there is choice, and no choice, and to get that right I do like to arrive at things energetically. When I’m painting, I forget myself, I get lost–it’s like meditation, and to forget oneself is wonderful.

Just to have an ocular anything is a miracle to start with. To see anything is a miracle. Just to be here is a miracle. I’d like to communicate that to people.

WILLIAM ZIMMER on JOHN KINGERLEE
The remarkable art of John Kingerlee results from a fusion of distinct, sometimes opposing, influences. Kingerlee is a 70-year-old British-born artist who has lived in Ireland for almost 20 years. He has been vagabondish most of his life, but is settled in a remote place of stark but imposing beauty, the Beara Peninsula, which can boast of being the westernmost point in Europe. He literally lives on the edge.

Wild nature, the landscape outside his window exerts a strong pull. A newcomer to the place comprehends immediately that the peculiar geology--large squarish outcrops of black or ocher earth--might easily be he inspiration for his abstractions. On my first visit Kingerlee asked me to look at the sunset. I expected to see a blazing sky; instead the sky held a tangle of pale wisps that had caught his attention. Kingerlee’s understanding of American art is selective but on the money. He is curious about the modernist John Marin. A statement of Marin’s applying equally to Kingerlee is, “I paint the really big forms--land, sea and sky.”

Kingerlee’s life is a powerful dynamic; the solitude in Ireland has a bustling complement. Kingerlee spends five months each year in Granada, Spain and Morocco. A favorite activity in those places is spending the day sketching the exotic people that stream past him. One can imagine him building up a supply of human imagery to sustain him and his art back in Ireland.

Ezra Pound is one of his favorite writers and a photograph of an aged Pound with his eyes closed is pinned up in his studio. Pound said, enigmatically, “Artists are the antenna of the race,” and Kingerlee is like a receptor that picks up and empathizes with people, on both the personal and universal levels. A telling example is that he took his time going through customs from a recent flight from Spain. He was picking up discarded ticket sleeves and boarding passes to use in his collages.

The figures in Kingerlee’s work are mostly slight, indicated rather than boldly enunciated, This seems a paradox given his strong interest in people, but no matter how ephemeral the figures, they establish their dominion. The result is that exalted state in art, the clear mystery. Every element is lucid; the colors in his work are unusually clear and never muddy. In large measure, this might be the influence of the clarity of his life. For instance, everyone must remove their shoes when entering his house and regular intervals during the day are set aside for prayer. Most of the Kingerlee’s food is produced by them--bread, vegetables from their organic garden and honey from their own bees. They waste nothing.

He is quick to acknowledge his strongest artistic influences. Perhaps the artist who has influenced him most of all is Paul Klee. A Klee exhibition currently in New York highlights his exquisite delicacy. In the early 20th century Klee’s  delicacy opposed a prevalent art of increasingly raw emotion. A similar exquisite delicacy shows through Kingerlee’s art, the more so because it shines through rugged surfaces. Jean Dubuffet has also fed his art in a seemingly opposite way. Art Brut, whose name Dubuffet coined took inspiration from the art of genuine outsiders, including convicts and mentally ill persons, is characterized by a thick impasto surface into which he dug. It’s not surprising that Kingerlee is interested in Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I am reminded of another literary pronouncement, this one by Henry James: “A writer must be a person on whom nothing is lost.” Substitute artist and you have Kingerlee. The background of many collages are pages from the Anthony Trollope novel, Rachel Ray. Trollope wrote penetratingly about society and especially inter-gender issues. Kingerlee put on soul music the first occasion I had a long look at his art. He has a sleek new television on which he watches the news for the first time in his life--a mixed blessing--and a DVD player along with a pile of movies.

With some disingenuousness Kingerlee has described himself as an outsider artist. No one this well-traveled could qualify as one and yet there is some truth in his statement. He is operating outside the art world that grabs all the attention; that which is high on technology and resembles popular entertainment more than traditional art practices. John Kingerlee’s art is triumphant because it transcends
all such props. It is based in an imagination sustained by enchantment, observed reality, and superlative talent.

JOHN MENDELSOHN on KINGERLEE
Paintings are touchstones, a myriad of paint strokes, each with their own specific gravity, valence, and charge. From this magical contact, from this continual return, an image emerges, as if rising from the surface like a mirage. This simple miracle of the painter’s art, of the material passing into the phenomenal, like the body transfigured into spirit, is at the heart of John Kingerlee’s work.

Kingerlee creates intimately, all the better to lose ourselves in his painted worlds without the burden of grandiosity of size or gesture. This is not to say that this work eschews drama, for it engages in its own potent theatrics of loss, memory, and the possibility of their reclamation in the experience of the present moment. But it does so at a scale that can be held in two hands, like reading an ancient scroll. We sense in this work the enduring, immemorial persistence of rocks and walls, and of the spirit, at once human and transcendent, that inhabits them. Kingerlee’s paintings are literally in touch with their subjects, simultaneously tactile and visual. The intimacy of this work leaves no space between artist and subject, viewer and the experience of seeing.

Kingerlee paints in a number of modes, including figurative works, landscapes, and grids, that despite their singularity have a commonality of feeling. The figurative works include collages, heads, and poetic composite images. The collages incorporate everyday detritus such as postage stamps and transit tickets, and especially meaningful things like pages of the Trollope novel, Rachel Ray, that the artist’s father read to him as a child. These collages, often with drawn or painted figures feel like diaries that have been composed extemporaneously, as past and present layer and collide. The heads appear as ravaged but human, almost phantoms but still of this world, elemental as if made from light and stone. Both blasting sunlight and the rocky earth are the prime elements of the landscapes, raw, wind-blown, buoyant images that refuse to stay earthbound (even with the figures that haunt them), but meld with the mist and sky. The grids, abstract and implacable, like time itself, bear the evidence of struggle and effort, but achieve a calm beauty that exists because of, rather than despite, the history that has become a part of their identity.

And it is that sense of being, both hard-won and miraculously blessed, that marks all aspects of Kingerlee’s work, as we witness the evidence of life without end, amen.

Further information on John Kingerlee can be found at www.kingerlee.com.