John Kingerlee was born in Birmingham, England in 1936. His Mother was related to Hogan's from County Cork and he was educated in a school run by the Marist Fathers. After living for twenty years in Cornwall in the far southwest of Britain, he moved in 1982 to an isolated farmhouse on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, Ireland.
Whether by chance or design, Kingerlee's decision to 'go west', leaving behind a predominantly Anglo Saxon environment in preference for the wild scenery of Europe's most westerly shores, saw him following in the footsteps of the great Celtic Revival artists and writers of the early 20th Century, and just like his fore-bears, he has found this place of rocks, seas and majestic skies where nothing is static, to be a source of continuous spiritual invigoration.

In this setting, looking directly out from his home across Kenmare Bay to the ring of Kerry, John and his wife Mo lead a life which some might describe as lonely.
However, what they lack in human contact they make up for through an existence, which extends to growing their own vegetables in their organic garden. The Kingerlees' alternative outlook on life somehow seems to be in complete harmony both with the space they inhabit and with the art that flows from John's palette knife and brush.

A non-conformist at heart, John has turned his back on the traditional way of seeing and depicting landscape - as a series of parallel planes that are made to appear to recede from foreground to background by the artists manipulation of linear and aerial perspective. Recognising that perspective itself is a mathematical construct, John takes a different approach that is as radical as it is original. He states that he wants his art to recreate the experience of being in and moving through the landscape.

Artist's Work