Neglected Corners 1990-2006

From 1990 landscape studies closed in on those corners where man’s interventions had lapsed and nature was reclaiming territory. Overgrown gardens with dilapidated sheds, smallholding yards and workshops littered with obsolete machinery, fabric patched with rotting boards and rusting sheets became the subjects for a second series of paintings on paper.

These were not presented with any sentiment or picturesque charm; the paintings caught a sense of abandonment, the fragile thread of history, a failure to adjust, and the tired back of a community that had, in part, surrendered. 

These declining corners were captured before a new generation came to ‘develop’, renovate and give new purpose. Later scratching deeper into the discarded utensils and implements, buckets, and shovels; their clatter and clang now silenced, he made them sing again in a new set of still-life paintings. Sitting in streams of sunlight on swept yards, the old tools claimed a new status.

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Mountjoy’s reengagement with his native county led from landscape through a series of closer studies of sheds, barns and what he has referred to as scenes of ‘rural neglect’. He may have tried to capture a fast-disappearing world where through the late 1980s an improved economy was leading to some excessive ‘tidying up’. Old barns were being ‘converted’ and makeshift sheds torn down to make way for fashionable gazebos.

He began to rescue and collect items passed down from previous generations – his mother’s shopping basket, father’s shovel, great uncle’s watering-can and used them as subjects for still-life paintings. These were the utensils that had been integral to the lives of his parents and their contemporaries. This was part nostalgia and part continuation of his understanding of self and roots. 

The labour that had gone into the making, maintenance and use of these items was now being carried over into the making of paintings of them. He moved from painting the contexts in which the items were once used to still life studies of the items themselves – reflecting on the lives that had used them. Gradually the part played by light on the curved, worn and textured surfaces came to dominate and he began selecting subjects for their physical rather than intrinsic qualities.

Some paintings remain with the artist - mostly 20 X 30 Cms Acrylic on Paper. Bucket and Thrushes Egg was exhibited and sold at the RWA, Bristol and ‘Watering Can with Brass Spout’ was exhibited and sold at the Lynn Stainer Painter Awards, Mall Galleries, London in 2005.