The Genius Of John Kingerlee
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 south-west 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 forebears, 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.
Explore the World of Kingerlee
There is no limit to Kingerlee’s invention… He views the world as an exhaustible supply of raw material for his art. In truth, he is as much an alchemist as an artist… John Kingerlee’s art, more than a unique vision of nature, is a lone voice of responsibility in a world beset by consumption and exploitation… John Kingerlee may be to the twenty-first century what Turner … was to the nineteenth century and Cezanne … was to the twentieth.