The intense colouring and poetic lyricism of John Luke’s tempera paintings link him with a time when artist and craftsman were one. Martyn Anglesea assesses this unique painter
I never met John Luke, though he was still alive when I first came to Belfast in 1972. I came across his work in a curatorial capacity, and quickly got to know many people who had attended Luke’s life classes at Belfast College of Art, where he taught from 1953 until his retirement in 1973. Luke spent the first day of term teaching his new students how to put a very sharp point on a very hard pencil. Before each life class he worked with a tape measure carefully spacing the students’ donkeys in a perfect semicircle around the model. The students respected him, finding him quiet, gentle and shy. He was not a dogmatic teacher. He would look at a student’s drawing and say ‘There’s no form there, but this is how you might do it’ – and perform a small demonstration in the corner of the sheet of paper
The Lemon Street Gallery, in collaboration with RTÉ, are currently hosting an exhibition marking the fiftieth anniversary of the photography of Dublin by Nevill Johnson. For the first time a chronological account of Nevill Johnson’s artistic career is illustrated; mainly through photography, but also incorporating his painting and writing. The paintings range from the early 1940s to the ‘London’ paintings. The occasion also marks the launch of the Nevill Johnson Annual Award to assist emerging artists in the North and the South of Ireland, thereby acknowledging the influence of Belfast and Dublin on Nevill Johnson’s artistic development. At the height of his career as a painter Nevill Johnson turned to photography; Eoin O’Brien and Dickon Hall explain why