John Pearce Watching the grass grow Nature in Art

Описание: JOHN PEARCE has a painting on long term loan to the collection. It is typical of his work, depicting a favourite subject – untended or semi-wild urban gardens –which he describes as ‘small, fenced-off, owned areas of the planet, offering a unique sense of closeness to nature and at the same time, a remoteness from the world, affecting how we see ourselves and behave in relation to the Earth’. John has exhibited in France and the UK including at Tate Modern and Geffrye Museum.
Since leaving Hornsey Art College in the 1960’s, where his paintings and stained glass were often in a symbolist style, he has painted from direct observation. Though living in London, he was always drawn to natural settings – wild urban gardens, as well as countryside – and found the time he spent on each painting becoming increasingly prolonged. Many of his plein-air paintings have come to be called ‘plantscapes’ rather than ‘landscapes’, as they are close-ups of natural plant communities, usually in the margins of cultivation and wilderness. Contrary to what some people seem to think, his paintings aren’t photographic. They are observational drawings made directly in paint, usually dispensing with preliminary drawings in other media, and painted continuously over periods of several months – though, he says, always taking a break on Saturdays!
This video shows John at work in Normandy. As usual he is striving to paint a ‘community of wild plants’, starting with the most distant features and gradually working towards the foreground, painting overlaid lattices of vegetation. This, he says, ‘traces a journey through time as well as space, and often means that signs of seasonal change co-exist in the same picture’.
www.natureinart.org.uk
www.johnnpearceartist.com