An edited version of this profile appeared in the Autumn 2024 edition of the Irish Arts Review.
John Jobson is a hard man to track down. Turn off the N11 for Kilmacnaogue and head up the narrow and winding Bohilla Lane towards the Little Sugarloaf and you will surely get lost (as I did) trying to locate his secluded, tree-encircled property. This is a less challenging task, however, than digging out some background information about the artist on the Internet. Aside from his web site with a date of birth (1941 in Dublin), a record of his exhibitions and pen pictures of his work, you’ll find little online coverage to go on. The Irish Field web site proved a more fruitful source than any art-related sites, albeit focusing on his equine activities. Breeding, breaking and dealing in thoroughbreds has always been of interest to him since his early days in Kildare, and his wife Lady Lavinia Brabazon comes from a family with strong equestrian links.
Jobson has been an artist since his early twenties when he dodged a career in the Irish Guards by deliberately failing the exams for which his father, to ensure success, had sent him to a crammer. A sympathetic teacher at that school had spotted his artistic talent and advised him to follow his star. His earlier education at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen (the Alma Mater of Samual Beckett) had encouraged his interest in art by moving him into an A-level class two years ahead of his peers. He recalls “the extremely good art masters” there – especially a Mr. Tovee. It was outside the art room at Portora, aged 14, that Jobson had the epiphany that determined his future. The revelation came to him that “there’s one thing I can control in life and that’s what I put inside a frame – and that’s when I decided to be an artist”. His subsequent formal art education was sketchy. Having thwarted his father’s military ambitions for him, he went farming at the age of 18, working as a stock man in Kill, Co. Kildare. It was during this period that he “got seriously into horses”. He began breaking horses for the renowned Taafe family and eventually trained a few himself. While all this working on the land was taking place, he continued to make art and spent a couple of terms at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. He learned little there and suffered some discouraging encounters with the autocratic Sean Keating who had a tendency to insert his own marks into the students’ works in progress: “Keating was the most dreadful drawing master – no feeling for line”. A move to Surrey followed, where he was again involved with horses. He continued however to paint and to sell. A more productive learning period followed when an in-law, Lady Romayne Pike, who was a sculptor, directed him towards the City and Guilds in London. There he got an excellent grounding in drawing technique: “I knew what I wanted to learn and I learned quickly”. Jobson showed me a portfolio from that time with an impressive collection of life drawings. The very fact that he had carefully maintained his work from that period, demonstrated that for all his rural husbandry and equine activities, the artist within was determined to keep operating. He continued to sell his work piecemeal, frequently to friends in the racing business. He recalls a painting he did of Vincent O’Brien’s Derby Winner Larkspur for its owner, the American millionaire Raymond Guest. Guest hated the painting because, instead of idealising the animal, Jobson depicted an obvious imperfection in its conformation. The experience stopped him painting horses because he perceived that to survive “horse painters doctored the image”. His first solo show was held in the long defunct Grafton Gallery, run by Ciarán MacGonigal: “he really loved my work – he was taken by the colour”. Following the closure of the Grafton Gallery, he was taken on by Ib Jorgensen and also showed at the Wellesley Ashe Gallery. However, Jobson was never bound to Ireland, or indeed to any specific gallery for sales. His extensive travels in Europe and the USA led to him establishing relationships with galleries in Liverpool, London (including the prestigious Crane Kalman Gallery), Pittsburg and Maine in the USA, Germany and France.
Jobson is a tall, amiable man with noticeably large capable-looking hands. Making art takes place alongside his work maintaining his extensive property, much of which he built and landscaped himself. Before he settled in Wicklow, he lived in Sligo where he restored two 18th century cottages near Lough Nasool to their former glory – including a studio for painting. “I built stables, put down floors, roofed houses, even thatched”. While we were talking, he was interrupted by a phone call enquiring about whether he had watered the cattle grazing on his land. His experiences as a stock man back in Kildare was still being drawn on. He is far from being a dabbler in the arts however. Walking around his capacious studio, and later around his house, you see evidence of his productivity and creativity everywhere. Aside from the very many paintings, there are also some substantial bronzes (a horse’s head stood out) and a number of woodcut prints. This latter medium, the oldest form of print-making, allows him to demonstrate his skills with knives and chisels. Later, when we went down to nearby Kilruddery House owned by his in-laws (which houses his extensive current exhibition), a giant mural of his covers the walls by the restaurant. In addition to adorning the location with his art, Jobson worked for six years as a stock man on the estate when he first moved into the area from Sligo.
As an artist, he is exceptional in that he has little engagement with the Irish art scene, and it seems few artistic peers with whom he interacts. The only opinion he offered on his fellow Irish artists came when I asked him if he’d known Camille Souter who had lived in Calary, not far away from his home: “I do like her work” he opined. He has shown at the the RHA and the RUA in the past. However, he had two paintings accepted for the RHA Annual Show way back, and bizarrely they weren’t hung. He hasn’t bothered since. He suggests that their dark and uncharacteristically expressive style wasn’t acceptable to the staid academicians of the time. Looking at his colourful and eclectic work it is impossible to place his painting in any kind of Irish tradition. “Colour was always instinctive for me – I was lucky – I didn’t have to learn it”. There’s a touch of Colin Middleton in his occasional surreal paintings and in his eclecticism, and a hint of John Luke in the idiosyncratically coloured landscapes. But overall, you have to look across to France, to Cezanne and Matisse to find parallels. Matisse is one of the few artists he name checks, and a couple of the works I saw in his studios were painted near Cezanne’s beloved Mont Sainte Victoire.
Unlike many artists, Jobson does not depend on sales. “I never had to paint for a living, I always had other options on the go”. This gave him the liberty to paint when the inspiration to do so called. It was never a daily slog at the easel. Much of his work is painted en plein air and finished on the spot – without further tidying up in the studio. The subject matter depends on his environment. France provides much of his inspiration and his domestic encounters with animals is frequently in evidence. There’s a charming woodcut in the Kilruddery exhibition that shows a man drying the hooves of a horse with straw. This, he explained, is done to prevent a condition called cracked heels, sited at the back of the pasterns. He has mastered the woodcut technique for printing multiples – a rare enough skill these days where etching, lithography and, increasingly giclee prints (i.e. photographs) have taken over.
The predominant features of Jobson’s work are its liveliness in terms of colour and the eclectic nature of his style. On the wall of his studio, I was struck by a gorgeous little oil of a night scene in a French village. It’s an almost abstract painting in yellow and green that has the arresting stillness and radiance of true art. Cyclists occurs frequently: Long Ago in Sligo, painted in 1966, glows with light and life and a more recent work, Berlin Biker (see above), inspired by something he saw on a visit to that city, captures a playful, carefree moment. In contrast, On the Somme depicts the ectoplasmic figures of World War 1 soldiers crossing a blood-filled stream. Jobson’s wife Lavinia’s father died there and she also lost six cousins in that pointless carnage. While visiting the area, Jobson had such a vivid sensation of ghostly figures occupying the landscape that he did a sketch on the spot and completed the painting back at his studio - “the figures remained in my mind”. View from Rousssillon, another French-based work, shows the Cezanne influence – though some might feel his use of colour here is more Derain-like. A Tidal Backwater, Wexford with its complex, mottled light, is a work inspired by sketches made on his frequent fishing excursions on the River Slaney. Silkie Bantam painted using tempera shows again his versatility regarding media. The fowl in question spent a number of days contentedly caged in Jobson’s studio while he completed the work.
Visiting Kilruddery House, to view his extensive exhibition running there until September, I am struck by the number of red spots. Restaurants are notoriously difficult places to sell art, so this is a testament both to the accessibility and attractiveness of his work. But Jobson is benignly indifferent to the vagaries of the art market, to the current fads and fashions, and to the spurious hierarchies decreed by the RHA and Aosdana. Since that moment outside the art room at Portora, he has painted what he likes, when he likes, and has never, to quote Schopenhauer, “degraded his Muse to a whore.”
Dalkey
August 2024
