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John Pearce
JOHN
PEARCE was born in London in 1942 and 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.
It
was in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the domination of abstraction
in painting was starting to be balanced by a respect for the depiction
of situations and natural subjects observed directly (as seen in
the recognition given to Lucian Freud and, belatedly, Stanley Spencer)
that John Pearce began to discover his own distinctive voice. He
acquired a taste for the private wilderness of urban gardens, partly
cultivated, partly in a state of neglect. Working closely from his
subjects, often every bit as slowly as the natural elements were
growing, Pearce created compositions held together by a latticework
of overlaid vegetation, through which are threaded flowers or plants
marking progress from one season to another. Commenting, for instance,
on Brambles in a North London Garden, he speaks of the painting
evolving 'as an interplay of cool greens of reflected light and
warm greens of transmitted light, in the painting of leaves and
grasses: this in turn reflects the alchemy of photosynthesis taking
place in them. It also has a symbolic reference for me to the interplay
of detached intellect and involved feeling embodied in the process
of painting.'
In
the 1980s Pearce continued to work mostly out of doors, completing
each work entirely on location, but he also engaged in portraiture.
His work featured in the 'Spirit of London' exhibition 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 Guildhall
Collection. In the 1980s his works were exhibited in the John Player
Portrait Award exhibition 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. Working
always from direct observation, he continues to favour a large-scale
treatment of low-key subjects, approached with great intensity to
the point where his vision of a corner of nature seems to fuse with
his own identity as an observer. 'Each painting,' he comments, 'is
an integral part of my experience in a unique time and place. Inevitably,
time is not only a factor in the process: it becomes a subject of
the painting.' So it is that in the larger works, each requiring
many weeks to complete and always executed entirely on site, elements
of more than a single season can be observed in the composition,
creating a peculiarly odd and powerful impression: a contemporary
answer to the exquisite still lifes of the old Dutch masters portraying
flowers and plants from the full span of the seasons.
In
spring 2000 John Pearce was a major participant in The Art of Memory:
Contemporary Painters in search of Marcel Proust, a theme exhibition
which travelled to the National Theatre on the South Bank in January
2001. First one-man exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery 2002. In
2004 Pearce's work was featured in Tate Britain's major Summer Exhibition,
'Art of the Garden'.
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