Bibliography

Valeria Ceregini, Visual Arts Curator & Historian
'The Landscape of Thought and Memory'

'Moments to See Wonders in the Grass' Exhibition Catalogue
Drawings inspired by the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh,
Belfast, Inniskeen and Carrickmacross 2025

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John Price, a Northern Irish landscape painter, has developed a deeply personal and poetic approach to art, one that merges the visible world with the unseen, reflecting the intimacy of a place and the intricacies of its emotions. Through his drawings, particularly those created in the landscape itself, Price channels the silent depth of the world around him. His work reflects an unwavering commitment to the primacy of drawing, a medium that enables him to engage with the landscape in its rawest form, offering insight into his philosophical and artistic evolution.

 

Educated at Camberwell School of Art in London, Price immersed himself in an environment rich with the legacy of significant British painters. The teachings of figures such as Euan Uglow, Ben Levene, and Anthony Eyton, among others, profoundly shaped his development. While Camberwell provided him with the technical foundations, it also set the stage for Price to explore the core of his practice: drawing. This medium became more than a preparatory step; it became the conduit through which he could access the structure and emotional resonance of the landscape.

 

Drawing, for Price, is fundamental. His process is one of exploration, trial, and revision. Each mark on the page speaks to a negotiation between intention and spontaneity. His commitment to direct observation — capturing fleeting moments in the landscape — forms the heart of his work. 

In many of Price’s works, particularly those where trees, houses, or fields are rendered with both sharp lines and soft transitions, we see a fusion of exacting spatial depth and raw immediacy, echoing the Italian vedutista tradition. Like Canaletto or Guardi, Price’s landscapes showcase a profound commitment to perspective and architectural detail. However, unlike these classical vedutisti, Price’s charcoal drawings go beyond the architecture of a scene, blending it with the atmosphere of place, where the drama of the Irish sky and the tactile quality of the land itself come into play.

 

Price’s landscapes are not simply depictions of places but emotional translations of experience, emphasising a deep connection with the terrain, its textures, and its inherent rhythms. Working in the field, often with charcoal, he seeks not only to represent a scene but to evoke the essence of a specific place at a given moment in time. Price’s work is also profoundly influenced by the Irish poets he admires, particularly Patrick Kavanagh, whose words shape several of his drawings. Kavanagh’s reflection on the simplicity and depth of rural landscapes resonates deeply with Price’s approach: "To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience." For Price, the landscape is not something to be broadly generalised, but something to be intimately known, down to the smallest detail — a gap in a hedge or a smooth rock. This idea permeates Price’s work, where a seemingly small, insignificant moment in nature holds a wealth of meaning. The poems of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce further contribute to the poetic structure that informs many of Price's pieces, allowing him to fuse visual art and literature into a singular artistic expression.

 

The scale of Price’s work has also evolved, mirroring his evolving relationship to the landscape. His early en plein air drawings were often scaled up in the studio, but in recent years, he has moved to larger formats that bring the viewer closer to the scene. Drawings in sizes ranging from the smaller 38x52 cm to the monumental 122x152 cm allow Price to experiment with the tension between observation and abstraction, depth and surface. The expansiveness of these drawings invites the viewer to engage with the landscape as Price does, with a contemplative, expansive gaze that seeks to uncover what lies beneath the surface.

 

The interplay between direct observation and poetic inspiration is at the core of Price’s work, exemplified by his titling of drawings after poems and literary passages. For example, several of his drawings are titled after Kavanagh’s poems, such as Canal Bank Walk and The Sleety Winds, grounding his drawings in the poetic tradition of Irish landscape representation. Similarly, references to Joyce’s The Dead or Dylan’s lyrics, such as Not Dark Yet and When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky, further illustrate how Price intertwines music, literature, and visual art to create deeply resonant works.

 

Ultimately, Price’s drawings offer more than just visual depictions of the Irish landscape; they are explorations of memory, place, and the human connection to nature. As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Price’s work exemplifies this idea — his drawings invite the viewer not only to see but to feel, to understand the landscape with new eyes, where each mark and gesture becomes a new way of experiencing the world around us.

 

Through his thoughtful and poetic approach to drawing, John Price reveals the profound connection between landscape and memory, space and time. His works are not just representations; they are explorations of the layers of thought and history embedded in every view, each one a testament to the power of art to unlock the deepest meanings of the places we inhabit. In his drawings, the landscape is never simply seen — it is experienced, felt, and understood in ways that echo long after the final mark has been made.

 

The landscapes in his charcoal drawings are more than geographical representations; they are emotional mappings of place, steeped in the subtle nuances of time, weather, and memory.​