John Moores Painting Prize is, and will obviously continue to be, an essential part of the national calendar. It’s launched the career of household names, and pushes many out of their comfort zone when it comes to painting; what it is, how it is, and why it’s necessary.
Painting is a vast, diverse, often crowded medium, created through passion by artists who reflect our lives and identities back at us. It’s not always easy to bring that together and share an exhibition that defines a moment in painting, and there hasn’t really been a movement since the 1970s… so it’s hard to know what to expect.
The disparity of this year’s John Moores Painting Prize is a demonstration of that incredibly mixed, slightly confused state of painting today, but it’s also a vibrant representation of how and why people make art.
Graham Crowley, this year’s winner (deservedly) offered ‘Light Industry’ to the judging panel. The broad strokes of swan-highlighter-yellow beam out from muddy shadows. His subject is a motorcycle workshop in Suffolk, but it could be any garage, attic, allotment, or tool shed, anywhere in the world.
The greasy, cloying, pore-clogging swipes from a dramatically restricted pallet, make you itch an itch you can’t shake. You know? That itch that’s usually accompanied by some joyful satisfaction of a job well done.
It might be the cosy but claggy feeling after bringing Christmas decorations down from a dusty attic, or the knackered sigh of relief after working out where the oil goes after half an hour of googling how to top up a fiesta. We all know it. Graham Crowley put it on canvas.
And that’s it. That’s why he won, because, aside from it being an intensely attractive painting, it connects with you.
Graham Crowley’s work, even writing about it now, with the memory of that tone, is one that will stay with me, and spring back in to mind whenever I’m scraping dust from my cheek.
That’s probably where painting is now, despite the lack of visual coherence in the gallery. Somewhere where physical emotion has to be drawn. Whether it’s through familiarity, or by the inquisition of works like Samantha Rebello’s ‘At the King’s Table: The Queen’s Habit (Blancmange)’, or Lorna May Wadsworth’s ‘A Salvator Mundi’, which both blend technique with attention to materials. The results are exquisitely beautiful portraits that blend the familiarly modern with the familiarly antique.
In stark contrast, ‘My Studio is On the Bus’ is probably going to divide opinion, a scribbled statement in solid-set ribbons of acrylic paint over old bus seats, by Mollie Balshaw. But it’s a window into the world of the artist, and an invitation for viewers to have that conversation about space, and how culture can be observed, and what it is that offers inspiration.
Some raise a smile, like Linda Aloysius’ ‘The First Painting in History To Be Recognised By a Public Museum as Painting By a Working-Class Single Mother Artist’. It puts pressure on the museum by simply existing, whether it’s good or not. And that act builds a relationship between the viewer, the artist, and the museum. Whatever you walk away thinking, you’ll have probably spent a moment to put yourself on one side of the argument.
Those delicate invitations to feel something for a painting, or as a result of one, are probably what comes out strongest from JMPP this year. It’s not so much about the coherence in style, but about pulling on our ability, as an audience, to accept an invitation.
John Moores Painting Prize is open at Walker Art Gallery until 25th February 2024.
Graham Crowley won John Moores Painting Prize 2023, with the backing of jurors, Alexis Harding, Chila Kumari Singh Burman MBE, Marlene Smith, The White Pube & Yu Hong.
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith