My name’s John Britton.
I’ve always been an artist. It was my refuge through an unhappy adolescence, and my passion in the decades since.
Mainly I’ve worked in performance – acting, directing, improvising, teaching. Often my work was wild, experimental, transgressive.
It took me all over the world, to many different communities and audiences.
A combination of ill-health and the pandemic caused me to pause.
Did I want to resume a hectic schedule of travel and collaboration?
The answer, clearly, was ‘no’. I wanted to reconnect with nature, grow a forest, rediscover stillness.
So I moved to Ireland – to Fanad at the far north of Donegal.
It was time to focus more on those quieter creativities, less on the public work of making performance.
I realised something else. However wild my performance work had been, there was a core of quietness in it. I’d often felt the deepest meaning of performance – in music, dance or theatre – was the shared moment of silence that happens at the end, when everyone, audience and artists, share a moment of arrival.
Connection and temporary community.
Movement defines stillness.
Sound defines silence.
So it is that I focus on creating moments of calm through my painting.
I am not concept-driven. I am not trying to make a grand statement. I want to create an experience for the observer. I want you to pause in front of a picture and for it to echo in you. What it means to you is your business not mine.
That’s as close as I can get to ‘an artist’s statement’
I look for the simplest possible way to shape empty space and create resonance.
My work is influenced by East Asian visual languages, but I make no claim to represent any of those styles.
I paint, inspired by nature, in my tumble-down house on the Fanad Peninsula, on the edge of the Atlantic, in rural Ireland.
My deepest hope is that each painting encourages you to pause for a moment, come into this present moment, and hear the passionate silence of now.
I hope it brings you a gentle calm.
10% of all my income from Art Sales goes to support social and environmental groups locally and internationally.
