Articles THE EAGLE
at the recently opened Northcote Theatre in Exeter. Based on a Welsh folk tale, the theme was, significantly, a visual one, the plot centring on destructive conflicts arising from different conceptions of female beauty resulting in the mutilation of a naturally beautiful young woman who is made to conform to popular tastes.
A particularly interesting aspect of Ewart Johns’ life and work in recent years has been his ability to come to terms with the gradual onset of blindness caused by the progressive condition retinitis pigmentosa. At first he focused on outlines in black and white using a complicated apparatus of mounted camcorder and screen. These arrangements soon became more difficult in practical terms and less rewarding. However, although now completely blind, he has used his acute visual memory and sense of touch to devise means of working with clay and off cuts of wood to create a variety of sculptural pieces, ranging from small handheld ‘feelies’ to more complex studies of natural forms. This experience recalled for the artist the sculptor Brancusi’s experimental Sculpture for the Blind, involving a simple ovoid form carved in marble and exhibited inside a bag. The construction of wooden figures involves using an assistant to help with the physical assemblage of selected suitably shaped pieces using wood-glue or dowels. Most recently Ewart Johns has extended this approach to facilitate a new means of working again with colour. This is based upon his mental recollection of various Artists Colours with their names such as cobalt, ultramarine, vermillion, emerald, crimson lake and yellow ochre. After a lifetime’s experience these are still clear in the artist’s mind’s eye. The shapes of an abstract or semiabstract composition can be cut out of thick card and colour-coded and assembled on a firm backing. Once again, the help of an assistant is then required to paint the forms and glue them in position. Thus, aided by his trusted amanuensis, Diana Gower, Ewart Johns is painting again and in May 2009 was able to mount a new exhibition of work.
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The breadth of Ewart Johns’ interests and activities, together with the fact that these have been based away from London, have tended to work against his wider recognition as an artist. His life does not conform either to the popular conception of the bohemian artist struggling alone with a creative obsession, or to more contemporary notions of artistic notoriety and ‘celebrity’. Proximity to metropolitan centres of influence and ‘the market’ have clearly been critical in the establishment of many contemporary reputations. Nevertheless, Ewart Johns’ work has a strong following and is held in a number of public and private collections, both in this country and abroad. The paintings now located in St John’s College are an appropriate and welcome addition.