For some time I have been trying to understand how we experience landscape. This new work documents my struggle to express the complexity of our relationship to landscape and its relationship to us. The meaning for us of landscape in this post-modern technologically-driven world has changed. The Irish landscape I portray is unchanged – its depth, stillness, beauty and darkness find their expression on canvas as if the hand of man had never touched it. These are not abstractions of particular landscapes, they are attempts at making concrete the abstract emotions that landscape - in particular Irish landscape - can instill in us. Trusting my intuition, I am willing to take chances with my landscape painting; depicting tension or energy between the flow and stillness almost always forces me to rely on a more intuitive reaction to the medium I'm working with. I believe that the medium I work in is at least as important as what I seek to convey through it. Much of my landscape work ends up evoking a dreamy, mysterious, almost mystical quality and I am certainly striving for this as well as maintaining a finely balanced, simple strength in the finished landscape image. The textures, the painting and the drawings - often intertwining and overlapping - are aimed at heightening the sensuous physicality of the canvas surface. In a world of disconnection, exploring and renewing our connection with the natural landscape demands that we listen and experience landscape as well as just casually observing it as a blur from our car window.
Jonny McEwen
Jonny McEwen is a Belfast based artist who works with acrylic on canvas evoking Irish landscapes, urban spaces, boglands, beaches and distant horizons in a cool, predominately abstract style. He is rapidly becoming one of the most sought after artists by collectors of contemporary Irish art and is sure to consolidate this new position in the coming years. McEwen's work has been recently acquired by the Office of Public Works and for the UTV collection. He is a graduate in art from the University of Ulster.