Monk at the Lake

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.