On the Road Again

Johnny Forshall started painting as a very personal way of thanking old and much loved friends. "Perhaps fittingly, in one case, the resulting picture hangs in their downstairs loo. I, at least, was sufficiently impressed by the results of my efforts to carry on - and the results of that work were contained in an exhibition at the Jonathan Cooper Gallery."

That was a little over two years ago in 2022 and featured paintings from Devon, Mull, Morayshire, Ithaca and Croatia. The period since has seen him continue on down that road. He derives much pleasure from being inside the heat, the cold and the wet, at different times of day and year and trying to find the means to express that with pigment, brush, paper and water.

"The physical beauty of this abused and too often taken for granted planet is under such constant threat that I hope that my efforts may have some value as a personal record and that I can help to open more than just my own eyes to that beauty. Of course, that beauty has often, indeed has usually, been shaped by man and that is certainly the case to some degree in all of those pictures featured from this section of my journey. Sadly, with the march of ‘progress’, that once apparently benign impact so often now involves the relentless and wholesale destruction of the beauty once so readily available in this country and on this planet."

The road has taken Johnny from Devon to Mull, Morayshire again and again, Shropshire never enough, Cornwall, Ronda, Ithaca, Ibiza and Marrakesh. And now London, Notting Hill and J/M Gallery.

"My thanks go out to the friends who have enabled each and every one of those journeys and to Richard Oldfield in particular, whose kindness is apparently infinite and who, however accidentally, enabled this exhibition."