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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 compo-
sition. 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”
€20,000 - 30,000
