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John Shinnors (b.1950)
Over the Estuary
Diptych, oil on canvas on panel, 110 x 152cm (43¼ x 60")
Signed; also signed and inscribed verso
Provenance: Formerly the Bank of Ireland Collection;...
John Shinnors (b.1950)
Over the Estuary
Diptych, oil on canvas on panel, 110 x 152cm (43¼ x 60")
Signed; also signed and inscribed verso
Provenance: Formerly the Bank of Ireland Collection; Private Collection
The expansive estuary of the River Shannon ranks high in the list of subjects habitually revisited by John Shinnors. Why not? He is, after all, a Limerick-man through and through, and one of the foremost artists indelibly associated with the city and its surroundings. He is not, though, a landscape painter per se. For him, as he remarked 20 years back, a painting "has to do with other things in the landscape."
Sometime prior to that, one grey, misty day he was walking on George's Head near Kilkee. Gazing at the rocks below he glimpsed a tiny figure. Drawn upwards, his eye registered a flash of yellow, a kite soaring on the air. "...Something clicked. It had all the elements - the human presence, air, sky and sea, a kind of dynamic interaction, and me, an interpreter."
Dynamic interaction is the crux. His paintings zero in on moments when familiar things are caught in configurations that make them disconcertingly unfamiliar. Each individual composition is also a concatenation of different surfaces, juxtaposed, overlapping, captured in conjunction and collision, dependent on a fleeting, transitory combination of elements. It's when things are caught like that, thrown into disarray, when habitual perception is momentarily outflanked, that he sees the chance of a picture, and goes for it.
He did not set out with the aim of becoming a professional artist. His attendance at Limerick School of Art could be described as casual - though the school was then overseen by Jack Donovan, an exemplary influence. After time spent wandering in England he returned to Limerick and taught art for a while. His early, highly realist style was usurped by the sudden realization that a painting could be more than a representation as such, that it could enshrine that magical, inexplicable moment of "dynamic interaction." A master of a monochromatic palette, endlessly inventive with a distinctive visual wit, he's never looked back since.
Aidan Dunne, May 2021
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