John Kingerlee
Artist profile
John Kingerlee was born in Birmingham, England in 1936. His Mother was related to Hogan’s from County Cork and he was educated in a school run by the Marist Fathers. After living for twenty years in Cornwall in the far southwest of Britain, he moved in 1982 to an isolated farmhouse on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, Ireland.
Whether by chance or design, Kingerlee’s decision to ‘go west’, leaving behind a predominantly Anglo Saxon environment in preference for the wild scenery of Europe’s most westerly shores, saw him following in the footsteps of the great Celtic Revival artists and writers of the early 20th Century, and just like his fore-bears, he has found this place of rocks, seas and majestic skies where nothing is static, to be a source of continuous spiritual invigoration.
In this setting, looking directly out from his home across Kenmare Bay to the ring of Kerry, John and his wife Mo lead a life which some might describe as lonely.
A self-educated artist who has followed his own path for more than 50 years, Kingerlee paints thickly sculptural interpretations of the wild landscape of sea, rocks and sky inspired by West Cork or Morrocco. He is one of a very small group of contemporary Irish artists whose work is collected in the international market. In 2007 and 2008 his work was seen in in a 20-stop museum tour in the U.S. In 2016 a large retrospective exhibition marking his 80th birthday showed at the Luan Art Centre in Athlone, Co. Westmeath.
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