From Curator to Creator

For most of my life I looked at other people's paintings.

Throughout 45 years as a curator and art educator, I spent my days opening the eyes, minds and hearts of people, young and old, to great art. I mounted exhibitions, gave hundreds of lectures, and co-founded the art consultancy Sheeran Lock with my wife, Imogen. What I never did was make art of my own. It was a no-go area for me. I worried that, as a curator, I would be super-critical of anything I made, and apprehensive about what other people might think.

I had spent a lifetime encouraging other people to explore their creativity, my own children among them. Then, in 2019, one of my sons turned the encouragement back on me. ‘You love art so much,’ he said, ‘why don't you give it a go yourself? You’re not getting any younger. Just go for it!’ It felt like a circle was closing. I thought, ‘I'm going to dive in and see what happens.’ I am so glad I did. In my later years it has been life-changing, and I cannot now imagine my life without making art.

My pictures are about the excitement of being in nature: the wonderment, the energy, the joy of feeling I am part of it. Man and nature are not separate. We have a paradise in nature here on earth and my art is my way of celebrating it. The work is raw, and I like that. I think it gives it strength and vitality. I have long loved the heightened sensation of Van Gogh, the way he paints feeling with intensity and truth. I am not describing what I see in front of me. I am capturing what I feel inside: my exhilaration and the way it just bursts out of me as a picture.

I am drawn to landscapes I know well: the fields of County Wexford where I spent childhood holidays; the moors around Hebden Bridge where we lived for almost a decade; 30 years of Suffolk fields and skies; and more recently the countryside of Tuscany and Umbria. Above all I am inspired by the sunset. The sun is the ultimate life-giving force, and the sunset, for me, the ultimate celebration of life. I mostly capture it in exaggerated glory. It is landscape at its most passionate.

I work fast using brightly coloured tempera paint sticks, the grown-up cousins of the wax crayons I loved as a boy. I rarely know where a picture will take me and where it might end. That is what makes the act of creating such an exciting voyage of discovery. I usually tackle a subject many times over, in a series, varying a limited range of colours to see what each version reveals. To me every picture is like a small epiphany. I love the idea that a painting of mine is a piece of me, and through it I can share my inner passions with others.

I spent my career encouraging other people to practise their creativity. Now, at last, I am practising what I preached.

John Sheeran