John Brown at Lemon Street Gallery

If one searches to find a link between Scottish art and that from Cornwall, a significant commonality must be an enduring interest in landscape coupled with an expressive response to it. Both are Celtic lands – this may or may not be significant – and each has a terrain of monumental, almost mythic proportions that has inspired and moved poets, writers and artists since the dawning of such sensibilities. In Cornwall the spirit of place is virtually palpable and has touched artists from Turner onwards becoming the natural bed-fellow of modernism from its beginnings. In Scotland it has found a similarly modernist thread that has been carried forward through the work of such artists as James Morrison and Duncan Shanks, the bare bones of place and the spirit that pervades it providing the essential grist to the mill of making paintings.

Scottish painter John Brown, who has his first show in Cornwall at the Lemon Street Gallery in Truro, is in this tradition. Like other artists working in the genre, he is a traveller who has found his subject matter on the hoof and shares with them, in that paradoxical way that painters born north of the border so often do, an inherent understanding, and passionate love almost verging on lust, for intense saturated colour. In Chiesetta di Vitalita for instance, painted in Tuscany, a small, white chapel sits atop a virtual incendiary of orange and scarlets and vermilion, made more inflammatory by a glimpse of vivid blue sky, a single suggestion of vegetation and a bisecting snail trail of a track. But there is more going on here than the simple play off between complementary colours.The energy in this painting comes not just from the vivid chromatic contrasts but from a rough-hewn, battle-scarred physicality that gives the lie to any thoughts that we are just admiring the view.

In our conversations, John describes how the process begins for him in situ making drawings using a short, stumpy pencil, as Bonnard did, that requires the movement of the whole hand to articulate.These sketches are then carried forward to become a jumping off point for his work in the studio. He sites Rauschenberg and de Kooning as major influences, both prime movers of NewYork Abstract Expressionism, but acknowledges also an empathy with Howard Hodgkin’s long meditations to arrive at the ‘essence of a subject’.These two twin strands – the meditative inner eye working through expressive physicality – are perhaps the key to his work. His paintings are not two dimensional, but built up in layers with a collage of fabric and scraps to create an underlying composition, a ‘scaffolding’ over which layers of paints are applied, then scratched back with the end of a brush, fingernails or whatever come to hand before being applied again to produce a textured, almost visceral picture surface.

It is in the large work (often tackled on the floor where his emphatic mark making is created using the whole sweep of his arm) that the narrative of landscape is most likely to blur into abstraction. In The Sweet Smell of Ginger, the neatly set out stalls we see in a painting such as Catalan Market Stall are nowhere to be seen. Instead we are presented with an interwoven tapestry of colour, texture and memory; a ‘Dreamtime’ map if you will, that describes the market, or the memory of the market, with (save for the defining anchor of a window grill) an almost entirely non-representational vocabulary.

Recently John has acquired a new studio with a garden that he is keenly cultivating and finding that here too are vivid chromatic subjects for paintings – a profusion of nasturtiums perhaps, or a bowl of chrysanths. Linger a while with these paintings, for here too it is the vigorous realisation of subject matter to reveal its vibrant essence that makes them so compulsive.

Pip Palmer, October 2009