John Wonnacott exhibition

Wed 1 February 2012 - Mon 5 March 2012

Clare Hall

Many painters produce multiple
self-portraits through their working lives. Painters make their own most reliable models; the painter/sitter is always present on the other side of the mirror when needed, never
forgets which clothes to wear and is willing to hold or alter any position as requested.

For any painter to present a
retrospective exhibition covering 50 years of such self-portraits must be both instructive and disturbing. It
allows any review and revaluation of aesthetic and intellectual development to be paralleled by the clearest visual evidence of physical decline.

In my Christian youth I would have seen this narrative of ageing as a falling away of the flesh to reveal the spirit.
Now as I enter secular old age, without knowledge of a soul to center my longing for the beauty of great art, I look instead to memory as shaping the mysteries of consciousness.

Fifty years of drawing practice has taught me to analyse the stream of new retinal pattern that feeds a memory already enriched by seventy years of living and
looking. Fifty years of inventing through trial and error with the materials of our craft helps me to recognize when a shape retrieved on the painting surface is truly like my inner experience of the outside world; when it has been so changed by its passage through the labyrinth of memory that it has gained a presence of
perceived reality that others too can share.

I am grateful to Robert Anderson and all the thoughtful members of the Art
committee for proposing so original an exhibition. It has been stimulating and
important for me to have the chance to review so long a confrontation with just my virtual self and no other major subject to distract from my singular pursuit of the revelation of appearance.

Cost: free