On John Kingerlee

by Medb Ruane
John Kingerlee paints with his head down. He places a card, or drawing pad, or paper on his table in West Cork and starts the process of trying to make art. No grand easel talks up his stature as a painter or gives a sign of the forces and influences that have kept him painting, head down, for over 50 years. In the spirit of Samuel Beckett, whose words he cherishes, Kingerlee must ‘go on.’ ¹

Kingerlee has kept his head down in other ways too. Although his life as an artist happens in an epoch of celebrities and self-promotion, his way of being is to place himself apart from art world politics and trends, keeping that head down instead, with eyes and mind focussed intensely on work in progress.

The scale of his paintings, drawings and collages doesn’t fit the dominant western museological model of big, bold pieces completing architect-designed vistas. His scale is intimate, sized to his hand and downturned head and to the places where he works. You can hold and exchange them like gifts, or like books.

His intensity operates as a microscope fixed on moments of feeling and seeing. The realtime spurs happen mostly in West Cork but also in the differently-lit streets of Spain and North Africa where he strolls with head up and eyes alert. Sometimes, scraps of real life – tickets, stamps, a Pellegrino label – operate as Proustian shadows that recalibrate times past into the present. Or, a pencil writes a mysterious phrase from some text or conversational scrap, such as “…he passed the last soldier with his money in his shoe…,” luring the viewer in closer to look and wonder. [No. 35, The Emigrant]

Kingerlee wanted to be a writer. ‘The art that I had tried was writing – words – but early in my marriage I found that I could paint, but couldn’t write, with the kids all around me.” ² The wish to write transformed into a practice of drawing and painting which, curiously, remains close in spirit to his love of letter, word and text.

He speaks through colour and light. He writes on materials, sometimes structuring the picture plane like a printer’s grid. Using a knife rather than a pen, he pastes paint onto a ground and then carves it into layers of depth and surface. In the lower right hand edge, he inks a logo rather than a signature, which signals when he is ready to let the work go.

His logo is deceptively simple. A stick man, a stick boat: it couldn’t be simpler. But like much of Kingerlee’s work, it shows more than it tells. The logo functions as an oriental ideogram does, where different calligraphic marks combine to make a symbol. Here, a sinuously-curved line suggests a boat, which in turn evokes a journey. That can only happen across water, water being an age-old representation of the deeper levels of the psyche, of the unconscious.

Especially in the years of the twentieth century that shaped Kingerlee’s practice, many writers and artists explored unconscious processes. At its quirkiest, the question was about making room for chance, for the happenings in a painting that push it above skill and artistry into dimensions of truth.

Kingerlee was steeped in the work of Modernists such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound, as well in the visual cultures of Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Antoni Tapies (and in the music of Elvis). Various other Modernists had engaged with automatic writing, oriental calligraphy and drawing, notably (and differently) Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey and Franz Kline. Some hoped for other-worldly influence, others wished to find inspiration – literally, to breathe, from the Latin spirare – by tapping into psychic forces, whether the Freudian unconscious or Jung’s model of universal collective archetypes.

Kirk Varnedoe comments, for example, on Jackson Pollock’s experiments with automatic writing and calligraphy:

… the concept of making art by “automatic” gestures – trying to abandon conscious control in order to allow unconscious areas of the mind to guide the hand – was very much in the air…“Pure psychic automatism” was the royal road to fresh creativity … [Pollock] was almost certainly interested in the kind of liquefied figuration employed by the Frenchman André Masson, partially through “automatic” techniques of spilling ink and sand.³

Kingerlee’s curiosity about the unconscious led him to study Karl Jung, who broke from Freud with his theory of a collective or universal unconscious reservoir beyond and beneath everyday experience. This, overlaid on the philosophies of Rudolf Steiner, in whose communities Kingerlee had lived and worked as a gardener, gave the artist access to ways of being and doing that spliced Steiner’s emphasis on ‘ethical individualism’ with Jung’s insistence on a beyond of human experience calling to individuals at a deep level. His encounters with Steiner’s philosophy as a metaphysics and as a way of living led him to examine how spiritual and material overlap.

The paintings are draped over such mystical, transcendental values and delve into their dimensions. Each is a journey that takes place over months, even years, as the artist begins, paints, pauses, looks again and touches the canvas some more. The time they take to emerge as finished works isn’t the time of units of production or manufactured items, obeying a linear command to fit a linear timescale, whether it be Greenwich Mean Time or Eastern Standard Time.

Kingerlee’s time is more like what WB Yeats writes of in Sailing to Byzantium (1928), where time is a spiralling, shifting “perne in a gyre” that speaks at once of “what is past, or passing, or to come.” The image conjures up the Sufi initiates, or whirling dervishes, whose spinning (dhikr) is a bodily prayer to their God.

Norman Jeffares quotes Yeats’s own words about the poem: “I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts about that subject I have put into a poem called ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jeweled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolise the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.” ⁴

Kingerlee’s ethics are also oriented to a ‘holy fire’5 leading beyond ego towards a universal order that urges each individual to be mindful of their work and lives. Ego is an obstacle to be put aside so that chance may let the paintings happen as moments of truth. The works are full of incident, of glazed moments and heightened depths. At the level of surface, paint moves like lichen on rock, sand on mollusc, ripple on water. At the level of image, colour evokes mood, emotion, feeling.

His practice is not landscape, not figure, not representation. Even when titles – such as Coastal Kilcatherine or Magic of Beara – point towards a figurative intent with a literal source, the works themselves are anything but. Human features emerging in Head (I and II) or the larger Headscape (2010) are questions, not portraits or images. Sometimes, they wonder about recognition, about what the eye is drawn to when perceiving human features, as a child who looks at the moon and sees a man there. Or, they recall Kingerlee’s head down way of working, his hand moving to find a facial feature looking back at him, with all the amusement that provokes.

Each painting is a journey, as his logo says. Like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wayfarer paintings (c. 1818), or Louis le Brocquy’s Ging heut’ morgen über’s Feld (1956), a single work is another step in Kingerlee’s lifelong formation as an artist. The journey is a sublime linking of being and doing, an unveiling of the spiritual and material textures that can happen, by chance, in paint.

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Medb Ruane is a writer and practising psychotherapist, who has published and broadcast extensively on art, culture and politics in Ireland and served as a board/committee member on various cultural and psychoanalytic agencies. She is currently GREP research scholar at University College Dublin, Department of Art History and Cultural Policy.