Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Dreams and Nightmares, 22 May – 15 July 2012;
Woking, The Lightbox, Landscapes of the Mind, 1 January – 28 February 2013;
Woking, The Lightbox, John Minton and the Romantic Tradition, 28 January 2017 – 9 March 2017
In the early 1940s John Craxton was mentored by Graham Sutherland, and followed him to Pembrokeshire. Sutherland encouraged the young artist, “It’s important to invent. Take a section of the landscape and try to evoke the wider place.” His paintings frequently included a solitary figure, a shepherd or a poet, in sometimes menacing landscapes. The landscapes were entirely imaginary, the shepherds were also invented. As Craxton commented, “I had never seen a shepherd – but in addition to being projections of myself they derived from Blake and Palmer. They were my means of escape and a sort of self-protection. A shepherd is a lone figure, and so is a poet. I wanted to safeguard a world of private mystery, and I was drawn to the idea of bucolic calm as a kind of refuge.”
