John Kingerlee is an Irish painter currently living on the Beara peninsula, in West Cork. He is a convert to Islam and has a second family in Fez, Morocco.
On the isolated Beara peninsula, looking directly out from his home across Kenmare Bay to the ring of Kerry, John and his wife Mo lead a life which some might describe as lonely. However, what they lack in human contact they make up for through an existence which extends to growing their own vegetables in their organic garden. The Kingerlees' alternative outlook on life somehow seems to be in complete harmony both with the space they inhabit and with the art that flows from John's palette knife and brush. A non-conformist at heart, John has turned his back on the traditional way of seeing and depicting landscape - as a series of parallel planes that are made to appear to recede from foreground to background by the artist's manipulation of linear and aerial perspective. Recognising that perspective itself is a mathematical construct, John takes a different approach that is as radical as it is original. He states that he wants his art to recreate the experience of being in and moving through the landscape. In the studio, using his own made-up pigments, he mimics the cycle of growth and decay by working with matter in a very direct and hands-on way. He applies colours, deep pools of it, red brick, reds, molten silver and zinc, platinum and titanium, sulphuric yellows and so much more to dozens of paintings in various states of becoming. He paints standing up, applying a new layer of paint. His preferred tools are palette knives, and a decorator's brush which he holds vertically using a stippling technique.
Recognition
Kingerlee has exhibited works in Ireland, England, China and The United States of America. Art criticWilliam Zimmer gave a speech about the artist and his works at the Los Angeles exhibition in October 2006, curated by Masoud Pourhabib. At the time Zimmer was an associate of Katherine T Carter & Associates, an agency hired by Kingerlee's manager to promote the artist in America. William Zimmer - a New York Times art critic for 25 Years Kingerlee's "Grid Composition" was sold in on 15 November 2006 in New York for $156,000 a new record for the artist.
