John Shinnors (b.1950) Rooks Go West, Scarecrows Oil on canvas, 167.5 x 172cm (66 x 68'') Signed and inscribed with title verso Exhibited: ''John Shinnors - Twenty-one Paintings'' Exhibition,...

John Shinnors (b.1950) Rooks Go West, Scarecrows Oil on canvas, 167.5 x 172cm (66 x 68'') Signed and inscribed with title verso Exhibited: ''John Shinnors - Twenty-one Paintings'' Exhibition, The Taylor Galleries, Dublin, 2000, where purchased by current owner Born in 1950, Shinnors studied at the Limerick School of Art for a short period under Jack Donovan, and taught for several years before taking up painting full time in the 1980s. He has exhibited all over Ireland and his paintings are found in many public collections including IMMA, The National Self Portrait Collection of Ireland and the University of Limerick. Throughout his painting career he has been interested in representing and re-interpreting a wide repertoire of motifs, including cows, birds, kites, clothes, lighthouses and scarecrows. A restrained palette is characteristic of his work at this time, and through this palette he explored many variations of light and dark, and depiction of forms in shadow and light. At first glance, like many of his works, this painting has an abstract look but gradually recognisable shapes and forms reveal themselves as those described in the title. Painted in his characteristic colour combinations, the monochromatic shades are illuminated by a warm golden light coming from the right, or east if we are to read the painting like a field and the light as the sun rise. The black areas of the painting can be seen as both opaque surfaces, an end in themselves, and as voids through which other areas and levels of the painting are almost within reach. The subtle variations within the black tones - Shinnors has said he uses five blacks - are difficult to see in reproduction but the artist also uses thin touches of strong green, hardly visible to the casual observer but providing an intriguing contrast within the black space. Surface textures vary, building up the painting layer by layer in a quasi-collage composition. Yet the motifs are coherently placed, with shape and form balanced in relation to each other and across the large scale of the painting as a whole. Aidan Dunne, who has written extensively on the artist, noted: ''It is as though each painting is a site at which disparate things conspire to create a composition, a fleeting event that is caught, just about, in the twinkling of an eye, and pinned there by the artist''

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