Jonny McEwen
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.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
"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 in this exhibition 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
SELECTED COMMENTS ON JONNY McEWEN'S WORK
"The body of work that Jonny McEwen has produced for his exhibition in the Tom Caldwell Gallery is immediately engaging and wonderfully fresh. Whilst drawing upon an enduring theme, explored by many great Irish artists over the past century and beyond, of the landscape and our relationship with it, McEwen’s personal interpretation brings another perspective to bear upon that.
These works are not idealised, nor are they totally abstract; the topography of the landscapes can be discerned, even as the seasons come and go, and even as the evanescent nature of the light which suffuses those landscapes changes. He
manages to capture the fleeting feeling of the moment when that sudden, subtle change of light, with which the Irish landscapes are so associated, transforms the atmosphere and experience of even the most casual observer.
McEwen is firmly rooted in those landscapes, regardless of however abstractly he may paint them, be they bogland pools, glens, headlands, valleys, hills or rivers. Whilst the evocation of atmosphere is certainly poetic, captured beautifully as well in the titles of the pictures themselves, it is the immediacy of his response to the land which strikes.
The overall aesthetics of the pictures reveal a confident painter experimenting with both technique and composition. His self-declared ‘gestural style’ using a gentle and subtle palette (what wonderful ochres, muddy blues, greys and yellows, for example) is framed by an abstract, structural composition form, in which there is a ‘dialogue’ between carefully placed squares and blocks of colour. And yet, this balance and coherence is simultaneously subverted by an element of chance, by the willingness to admit the freedom of paint, at an unexpected turn, into the picture. Hence we have the characteristic ‘bleeding’ effect of paint running down one side in a number of those landscapes, perhaps evoking the natural blurring and moistness of Ireland’s countryside at certain moments in a season or even in a single day.
This body of work, on such a common theme, has been handled with distinction. McEwen has a wonderful talent and energy.
Roisin McDonagh - Chief Executive, Arts Council Northern Ireland
"Jonny McEwen’s paintings display a striving to express the self in relation to nature. His content is a place where the tangible, spiritual and subconscious meet, free from the trappings of landmark or the specific."
Colin Davidson - Irish Artist
"For Jonny McEwen, the catalyst for his finely balanced, peat coloured, abstracted landscapes, is more local in origin. In his reassessment of the Irish terrain, McEwen’s use of earthy tones and softly edged rectangular motifs that evoke field patterns and dry stone walls that appear to float above the damp surface of the canvas ground, demonstrates an affinity with the 1950s’ abstracted landscape and still life compositions of William Scott and the strongly gestural, tonal works of T.P. Flanagan’s “Gortahork” and “Bogland” series of the 1960s."
Amanda Croft - Teaching fellow and Acting head of the History of Art Department, Queen’s University Belfast.
"The content of McEwen's new work is eloquently revealed. There is no blatant parading or grandstanding designed to seduce the casual viewer, rather there is an expectation that when the initial pleasure of seeing these works passes, the true quality will only unfold and reveal itself through a calm, concentrated viewing.
As you step up to the mark to do this, the instinct on first viewing is of pleasure. Perhaps because the cool, light colours sparked with dark seem almost calmly and familiarly impressionist or perhaps because McEwen uses a horizen with faint echoes of landscape-type elements - and this initial familiarity is satisfying in itself, seeming to put the work firmly within a familiar context.
However, this work is not at all about traditional landscape set in familiar contexts, it is about something else altogether. McEwen's landscape are always devoid of human touch or human interaction - he is caught up in the changing skies, the shifting light and moods.
McEwen was an active "friend of the earth" long before the bandwagon rolled and he cares deeply about landscape and the role that humanity plays in seeking always to mould the physical environment to its will. For McEwen this work is about finding a new meaning in Irish landscape, of somehow re-inventing its landscape for himself.
The line, shape and colours have changed since his last two solo shows in The Hallward Gallery in Dublin and in the Caldwell Gallery eighteen months ago. It is almost a seasonal palette change from autumn to spring but more than that it is a move from landscape observed as a subject to landscape experienced as an event."
Chris Caldwell - Tom Caldwell Gallery
EXHIBITIONS
Selected Solo Shows
2009 Tom Caldwell Gallery
2009 Hallward Gallery, Dublin
2007 Tom Caldwell Gallery
2007 Hallward Gallery, Dublin
2006 Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast
2006 Hallward Gallery, Dublin
2005 MillCove Gallery, Cork
2004 Gormleys Gallery, Belfast
Selected Group Shows
2008 Mixed Show, Caldwell Gallery, Belfast
2007 4 Person Show, Caldwell Gallery, Belfast
2007 Royal Ulster Academy
2006 Royal Ulster Academy
2006 Milcove Gallery, Kenmare
2006 Halward Gallery Summer Show, Dublin
2005 Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast
2005 Millcove Gallery Dublin/Cork
2005 Waring Gallery, Moira
2005 Hallward Gallery, Dublin
2004 MillCove Gallery, Cork
2003 "New Artists, New Works, MillCove Gallery, Cork
2003 3 person show, Gormleys, Belfast/Omagh
2003 Simon Community Show, Gormleys, Belfast
2003 Cityscapes, Gormleys, Belfast/Omagh
2002 Iontas, Cork, Sligo and Belfast