This month we focus on a striking oil painting with an aura of Summer by artist Ewart Johns, whose parallel career was as an academic who taught at the University of Exeter.
This month we feature a striking painting by Ewart Johns (1923-2013), entitled Two Women, Prone and Sitting.
The original work was painted in 1991 in oils on board, and measures height 101 cm, width 152 cm (framed). It was donated to the University in 2018 by the family of the artist.
Semi-abstract, this picture conjures up a feeling of Summer, with blue sky and sea, and two women relaxing, possibly under a parasol. There is a more unsettling aspect to the picture however, with elements of dark shadow encroaching into the scene.
About the Artist
Ewart Johns was born in 1923 in Barry, South Wales. Studying Geography at Cambridge, he went on to teach Geography at the University of Exeter between 1948 and 1971.
He was a person for whom creativity and art bore equal importance to his academic career. In 1942-3 he studied life drawing under prominent Welsh artist [Ceri Richards] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceri_Richards) at Cardiff College of Art and in 1948 studied painting with Clifford Fishwick, principal of Exeter College of Art and Design and member of the Newlyn Society of Artists.
In 1972 the artistic side of Ewart Johns’s life came to the fore, when he was appointed as founding Head of Department of Visual Arts, Lancaster University, giving him the opportunity to share his love of exploring line, form and colour.
He moved to Devon in 1982, where he set up a studio, firstly in Exeter and then in South Brent, enabling him to concentrate on his own artwork, which included painting, drawing, and later making 3D objects from clay, board and wood.
He showed his work in several solo exhibitions, including in 1974 at the Scott Gallery, Lancaster University, in 2001 at Dartington College of Arts (coinciding with his award of an honorary degree from the University of Plymouth), in 2007 at Cube 3 Gallery, University of Plymouth and in 2008 at the Ceri Richards Gallery, Taliesin Arts Centre, University of Swansea. Throughout his adult life, he explored and experimented with different artistic styles. He drew and painted, and his subject matter included the human form and landscapes. He said of his approach to art in 2001:
There is no beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion.
A tree in a wind-scoured landscape is a tangle of branches and twigs. At any one stage in its growth the tree makes a unique shape, pleasing in its wholeness but puzzling in its complexity. For me, a painting or a sculpture must contain these properties. I know of no better way of describing a good work of art than that it should possess variety in unity, as does nature itself.
I have been fortunate in my teachers: Botticelli and Vermeer, Turner and Seurat, Gauguin and Picasso, Matisse and Klee, Brancusi and Moore, Sutherland and de Stael and many more. The most direct challenge came with the inventive drawings which Ceri Richards made, almost without verbal comment, alongside my early attempts in the life-class.
I started to paint only after years of drawing from life. Almost immediately I adopted a semi-abstract style using firm outlines and strong contrasts of colour. Later I experimented with a much more limited palette and tonal range. Then, for a time, I used selected parts of my own photographs as a compositional aid, before returning to a way of working not unlike the manner employed in my earliest pictures. So in many ways I have come full circle, but although the styles have changed, the constant aim has been to invent relationships of form and colour that satisfy a need for order and for the unexpected.
For five decades, apart from some excursions into landscape and townscape, I have been persistently attracted to the subject of the human figure in integral relationship to its surroundings, treating that figure to a greater or lesser degree as part of a general pattern of forms. I like drawing and painting women – not least because, in my experience, many women seem to enjoy being models.
My methods include working up a painting from a life-drawing , inventing a picture or a wood-construction from imagination, using photographs in realistic works, and at other times pushing an image close to the boundary of total abstraction – but never beyond. Pure geometry is not for me. The delights of oil on canvas or board, of water-colour on textured paper, of pastel on straw-board and of conte, wax-crayon, acrylic and recently of clay in their various ways are enough in themselves to inspire me to action. The results I hope will in their turn give pleasure. I have no wish to join the fashionable tendency to make art that will shock or anger. If the nature of my work will both satisfy and surprise, I ask no more.
About the Painting
This painting was executed in 1991.
The 1980s and early 1990s was a fruitful period following his move back to Exeter, from Lancaster. He was now a full time artist and his thoroughly learned skills enabled his creativity to flow with depth and richness. The stimulation of nature, from landscape, plants, and indeed the human form, fuelled his skill with line, pattern and colour to create visually very satisfying works such as this one. He would have used line drawings and smaller coloured pictures of one or more models (though not together) to then compose the larger painting.
The painting is one of several by Ewart Johns, which are held within the University of Exeter's fine collection.
Find out more about Ewart Johns and his art on the artist’s website.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the Estate of Ewart Johns and in particular Nick Johns, who provided information about Ewart Johns, his life and work for this article.
University of Exeter
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