John Pearce

Since featuring prominently in Tate Britain's Art of the Garden (2004) as one of five contemporary British painters represented in its survey of this theme in British art since Constable's day, John Pearce (born London 1942) has gained general recognition as a leading British nature painter.

Whether his subject be some corner of an urban garden or a stretch of countryside, John Pearce always works from direct observation on site, dispensing with preliminary drawing as he paints continuously over periods of as much as seven or eight weeks. Particularly with the larger paintings, the changing aspect of his subject as the season moves on becomes his true subject. 'Time,' as he puts it, 'is no mere factor in the painting process; it is itself an implicit subject in the painting'. This approach to the treatment of change and growth within the natural setting bridges the gap between garden and wilder nature in Pearce's choice of subjects. His highest commendation for a garden is 'well-neglected': indeed, some of the London gardens he knows so well, having escaped pesticides and fertilisers, have become virtual wildlife reserves. 'I began painting untended gardens,' he comments, 'largely because I wanted to paint long grass'.

It is in Pearce's handling of grasses and leaves that an essential feature of his approach becomes apparent: the springy, textural density achieved by his brushwork, a feature which distinguishes his technique from more traditional approaches to realism. While a painter such as Atkinson Grimshaw could aspire to 'no marks of handling', for Pearce the medium of expression is the mark of handling. 'I try to make each brushstroke as succinct and replete with meaning as possible, encapsulating the inner life of a leaf or blade of grass in a single stroke.' So it is that, often after much repainting and erasing, he embraces a fleeting moment when the paint and the action of painting become identical with the object.

A virtuoso handling of foliage and vegetation, rendered with such animation that the viewer has the illusion that this bush, this clump of grass, is still growing on the canvas, may deflect attention from another characteristic of John Pearce's work: its poetry. Cow parsley near Orval, Normandy is a vertiginous take on 'arguably the most important flower in the spring landscape' (Richard Mabey), as ubiquitous in Maytime as hawthorn, a 'plant of lace and moonlight' (Geoffrey Grigson), identified not inappropriately with the humble cow as a flower that blooms when the sun is in the sign of Taurus, the bull, whose upturned horns may be those of the new moon in this most fertile season. In painting The fish pool - a moody scene with its abandoned children's hut surrounded by submerged forests of the water weed elodea, the whole composition a contemporary answer to Albrecht Dürer's celebrated House by a pond - he has included, contrary to his usual practice, a carp which swam into his field of vision, caught moving underwater in a single brushstroke.

In painting both gardens and open countryside John Pearce mostly prefers to sit under a light canopy, which enables him to work at his canvas in every weather, important for an artist who has a special fondness for 'the clarity of rainy light'. Just as the plant studies of Dürer and Schongauer or Altdorfer's paintings of woodland suggest a northerner's predilection for subdued light without sharp contrast, so John Pearce sees himself benefiting from the often overcast or twilight conditions of a mild northerly climate such as prevails in Britain and northern France, where plein-air painting first developed.

Biography

JOHN PEARCE (born London 1942) studied painting and stained glass at Hornsey College of Art (1960 - 1963). Here his tutors included Bridget Riley and Maurice de Sausmarez and he won several college prizes, among them the Sketch Club Prize when the visiting judge was L.S. Lowry. In 1962 he was selected for the Young Contemporaries Exhibition in Suffolk Street, alongside emerging talents such as David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield. Pearce's symbolist painting, in contrast to the work of the early 'Pop' artists, was singled out for its 'originality and sincerity' by Anthony Caro at the Young Contemporaries Forum. He went on to postgraduate studies at Newcastle University and later at Middlesex University, embarking on a teaching career while continuing to paint for occasional exhibitions.

In the 1970s and 80s Pearce worked increasingly out of doors, completing each work entirely on location; typically, he chose at this time neglected back gardens of Victorian London houses as his subject but he was also active in portraiture. His work was featured in the 'Spirit of London' exhibitions at the Royal Festival Hall and London Stock Exchange in 1979 and 1980, when he was a prize-winner and a painting was acquired for the Permanent Collection of the Guildhall. In the 1980s his works were exhibited in the John Player Portrait Award exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery. Since 1984 John Pearce has devoted himself entirely to his own painting and has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1998. In spring 2000 he was a major participant in The Art of Memory: Contemporary Painters in search of Marcel Proust, a theme exhibition also shown at the National Theatre on the South Bank in January 2001, in 2005 he took part in Lair of the Leopard: twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily and in 2006 he contributed to Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and his World by twenty-five painters today. In 2004 his work was featured in Art of the Garden at Tate Britain. One-man exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 2002 and 2005. Works by John Pearce will be featured in Home and Garden: Domestic Spaces in Paintings from 1914 to the present (Part IV: 1960 - present) at the Geffrye Museum, Kingsland Road, Shoreditch, London E2 8EA between October 2007 and February 2008.

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