Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 7 December 2022

76 60 JOHN SHINNORS (B.1950) ‘Line’, (The Artists response to Frank Bramley’s ‘Domino !’) Triptych, oil on canvas on panel, 110.4 x 110.4cm each panel (44½ x 44½”) Each signed and inscribed verso € 60,000 - 80,000 John Shinnors is one of our most intriguing artists – a free spirit who maintains a benign indifference to the fashions and fads of the art scene. Apart from the early influence of his friend and mentor Jack Donovan, he claims no allegiance to any school or ism. “I am a Shinnorist” he once joked. His mature style is truly unique – ostensible abstraction formed from figurative elements but always with a slight air of mys- tery, the puzzle not fully solved. These days he rarely moves out of his native Limerick, and his painting is carried out in two studios (one for larger works) both of which are close to where he was born. His social life revolves around his family and a few pints after dinner in the Spotted Dog in Roxboro. He paints every day and has made a comfortable living for the past 25 years or more. A contented life with few alarums or excursions you might say. And yet his paintings invariably have an eerie and oc- casionally sinister feel to them – even those with ostensibly- mundane subject matter. His earlier surreal work, such as Resurrection Painting I , was more overtly disquieting but the disturbing ambiguity of his vision continues up to the pres- ent. You wonder whether some dark seeds were sown during those long summers he spent as a boy on an isolated farm in rural West Clare. His entertaining and gorgeously illus- trated memoir Adult Reading at Artist’s Bedtime recounts thebanshee tales his uncle liked to tell, the weird mannequin he came upon in an adjacent haggart dressed in woman’s underwear, and those visits to the lighthouse at Loop Head. These early encounters provided him with many of the mo- tifs that recur in his paintings: Lighthouses peering out into primeval darkness and ominous scarecrows with black sock- ets for eyes. These are clearly the stuff of nightmares but Shinnors also manages to make disturbing a flock of mag- pies wheeling above St. John’s Cathedral, a child’s kite high above St. George’s Head In Kilkee, and even clothes flapping on a washing-line. His monumental triptych Line owes its existence to an initia- tive by the Crawford Gallery in Cork. In the early part of the new millennium they created a programme whereby con- temporary artists were invited to paint a work in response to a piece in the permanent collection. The new work would then be displayed alongside its source of inspiration for a couple of months. Nice exposure for any artist. Shinnors was approached in 2004 and had no hesitation in choosing the painting Domino! by the British post-impressionist artist Frank Bramley as his companion piece. “I’ve been looking at that painting for 20 years” he claimed. When asked why, he kept it simple: “It is a beautiful painting and I don’t use that word very often”. It’s difficult to find too many overt links between the two paintings, one a well-wrought academic work and the oth- er a dark expressionist, quasi-abstract piece. The swathes of white in both form the most obvious connection and the flecks of colour on the steps and the wall in the background of Bramley’s painting find their echo in Shinnors’ painting- where his adherence to a severe black and white palette is