A gifted artist and his champion

The release of a new book on John Kingerlee is tinged with sadness at the tragic death of its editor, writes Marc O’Sullivan

DR Ted Pillsbury was one of the most prominent figures in the visual arts world in America. Among the posts he held was the directorship of the prestigious Kimbell Museum in Dallas, and he once famously turned down the directorship of the National Gallery in Britain. Pillsbury was 66 when he died in March of last year. Although his death was ruled a suicide, what drove him to shoot himself remains a mystery.

One of the last projects Pillsbury completed before his death was The Whole Planet Is A Garden, a book of essays on the Irish artist, John Kingerlee. Pillsbury edited the book, contributed an essay and commissioned 16 others from various art critics and academics.

On his first visit to Ireland in 2009, Pillsbury visited Kingerlee at his home on the Beara peninsula in west Cork. Pillsbury had come across Kingerlee’s work in a friend’s house in America, and became enthralled by the artist. Their meeting was captured on film and can be seen on the website kingerlee.com.

The Whole Planet Is A Garden, which is subtitled “the genius of John Kingerlee”, will have its Irish launch this Sunday, at the Wandesford Quay Gallery in Cork. The book will be introduced with a lecture by the art historian Mike Catto. Also present will be Kingerlee’s manager, Larry Powell, a collector who has also done much to promote the reputation of the Irish landscape artist Roderic O’Connor, and who also manages the career of the photographer John Minihan.

Over the past four years, Powell has organised a tour of Kingerlee’s work around some of the leading museums in America and China, which concluded with an exhibition in Texas in December.

The touring exhibition was curated by the late William Zimmer, an early champion of Kingerlee’s who was also credited with discovering world class artists such as Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring in his time as art critic at the New York Times. The tour was an extraordinary undertaking, one that raised Kingerlee’s profile at an international level and brought his work to the attention of critics and collectors who might otherwise not have heard of him at all.

The achievement is all the more extraordinary when one considers how isolated a figure Kingerlee is. He and his wife Mo live in a cottage in Kilcatherine, on the northern slopes of the Beara peninsula, and have little, if anything, to do with the art world. A compulsive traveller, Kingerlee has been to America just once, and disliked it so much he declined to visit any of the exhibitions of his work across the continent. A convert to Islam, he spends the winters in Morocco.

At 75, Kingerlee has been painting for over six decades, and the Wandesford Quay Gallery will host a retrospective and sale of his work to coincide with the launch of The Whole World Is A Garden. Drawings and paintings from the 1960s through to the present day will be on view from today to Sunday, and will be auctioned by Morgan O’Driscoll at 4pm on Sunday.

Among them will be landscapes, head studies, and figurative paintings, along with the Grids paintings with which he has become most associated in America. Each of the works is unique, and bears the Kingerlee monogram, which resembles a man paddling a boat.

Kingerlee was born in Birmingham in 1936 to a mother of Irish descent. He lived in London for a while, and later ran a pottery in Cornwall before moving to Ireland in 1982. In the late 1960s, he had enjoyed some success as an artist — the actor Richard Harris was an early investor — but a breakdown compelled him to give up painting for a time. When his family were reared, he returned to the medium with renewed vigour.

Kingerlee’s style is essentially experimental. He often works on paintings over a period of years, and sometimes decades, building up layers and layers of paint on his canvasses and boards. He mainly works with palette knives, and sometimes with a decorator’s brush.

What has enthralled collectors and academics alike is his instinctive use of colour to capture the otherworldliness of the landscape. Traditional landscape artists might baulk at the description, but Pillsbury hailed him as a true original and the natural successor to JW Turner and Paul Cezanne.

Picture: Art historian Ted Pillsbury and John Kingerlee at the artist’s home on the Beara peninsula in west Cork.