John O'Connor

John O'Connor wrote two letters to Ruth Borchard from his home and studio, at The Forge, Higham, Colchester, Essex, dated, simply, 1963. At the top of each is a small, delightful wood-engraving of The Forge set among trees. In this image, we glimpse a flint wall; as Jeannie O'Connor, his wife, noted: 'Essex flints [are] a material [that is] especially appealing to O'Connor as an engraver, particularly when they sparkle in the sun, after rain.'

In the second letter, O'Connor writes: 'I am sending a self portrait as promised. It is on hand made paper and the colour is light oil paint and turpentine. My wife comments that it is a good likeness if a little harsh and unkind. I personally am not unpleased by it & would be prepared to show it anywhere if I was asked to do so.'

This self-portrait is signed and dated in pencil (in a small box drawn over his shirt, below his heart) 'John O'Connor 1963'. Born in Leicester in 1913 – the son of an optical instrument maker, whose family had come from County Tipperary – the artist would have been around fifty years old when he made this work, though, with his full head of dark, tousled hair, he appears at first sight much younger, boyish even. Yet the very lightly scribbled striation across his forehead, and a tautness about the features, show that this is indeed an older man, subject to an element of nervous strain. The strangely transfixed, emphatic dark eyes and rather pursed lips, help explain his wife's reaction when she said that, as a likeness, she found it good 'if a little harsh and unkind'.

Drawn predominantly in black crayon and pencil, with a variegated overlay of yellow (and some brown) oil paint mixed with turpentine – creating a range of watercolourish and gouache-like effects – this is a curiously ambiguous self-portrait. There is an improvisatory air to the drawing of the slim, still boyish figure and casually open-necked shirt, even to the more delicately modelled facial features. It is a picture infused with a heart-warming sunniness (from the yellow wash on his face to bunch of flowers to his left and the rural vegetation seen through the window – the latter conjured up by an area of white paper shining through), yet one in which the artist seems perhaps to be resigned to growing old.

On 13th September 1950, Art News and Review featured O'Connor in its fortnightly front-page piece, 'Portrait of the Artist'. It illustrated in black-and-white a recent (though undated) watercolour self-portrait, a romantic, boyish view of the artist, in an open-necked shirt, by bird-filled waters and hills, under the bough of a tree, a cat at his side. Yet his deep, shadowed eyes and highly furrowed forehead hint that this is a somewhat troubled idyll. This picture is now in the Tate Archive.

O'Connor attended Leicester School of Art from 1931-34, before gaining a scholarship to study at the Design School at the Royal College in London from 1934-37. As Jeannie O'Connor has written in her commentary to The Wood Engravings of John O'Connor (The Whittington Press, Andoversford, 1989): 'John Nash and Eric Ravilious were tutors in the Design School, and Paul Nash also visited.' (Another teacher of wood-engraving was Robert Austin). As Simon Fenwick wrote in his Obituary of O'Connor in the Guardian (20th March, 2004): he was influenced by all his teachers there 'but from Ravilious he learned a great love of wood engraving. This was a golden age for private presses and, at 23, O'Connor made engravings for an edition of Joan Rutter's poems, Here's Flowers [Golden Cockerel Press] (1937), the first of many books.’

Jeannie O'Connor noted that initially as a student at the Royal College O'Connor found etching 'a subject fraught with difficulties [...] There seemed to be so much equipment – press, heaters, jiggers, acid baths, ink storage, all of which he found daunting and frustrating and which seemed to come between him and the image he wished to produce:' Then one day, he tried out some old engraving tools belonging to a fellow student. 'Eric Ravilious, walking through the studio, observed casually what was going on, and made a few comments [...] "Why not go to Lawrence [an old London premises where trade engravers used to get their wood] and buy a set of tools and get on with it?"' This O'Connor did. 'As well as a boxwood block, John bought a spitsticker, scorper and chisel, all of which are still in use half a century later.'

In a letter to the author (24th May 2004), Jeannie O'Connor wrote: 'in switching over [from etching] to wood engraving, he felt a tremendous relief as all the cutting could be done on the kitchen table, and printed on his small Albion press.’

O'Connor's wood-engraving art on the whole recollects what was for him the paradisal nature of early boyhood, a time of pristine vision. Many of these prints – with certain echoes of work in that medium by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), Edward Bawden (1903-1989) and Gertrude Hermes (1901-1983)– celebrate bucolic or domestic idylls in which people and creatures such as birds, cats and butterflies are seen to participate intimately in nature's harmonious patternings. He illustrated over forty books, mostly with wood-engravings, including Thyme and Bergamot (1947), Essex Pie (1952), The Wood is Sweet [poems by John Clare] (1966), The Poems of William Wordsworth (1973), and A View of Kilvert (1979). He made many richly intricate wood-engravings of adolescent boys and girls in gardens or by rivers or ponds; the decorative rhythms of rippling water, sparkling flowers, sun, moon and stars are mirrored within the outlines of the lithe, graceful human forms.

A description in Canals, Barges and People, written and engraved by O'Connor in 1950, is characteristic of the kind of pantheistic, 'oddly surreal' graphic style, with its nice visual paradoxes and compelling intricacies of form, with which he quite often delineated people set within wider nature: 'I once saw a boy fishing from the edge of a narrow boat about thirty miles from Uxbridge. As I stared at the water I noticed the oddly surreal character of his reflection. The nails and irons of his boots framed his face, and his head was almost hidden by long heavy willow branches which jutted from the sky towards him. All this was quite clear in the water image, yet the lad himself could not be seen for the screen of leaves pointing this time downwards to touch the water.'

Simon Fenwick has written: 'From 1940 to 1946, he served in the RAF, still managing to cut a few wood blocks. He arrived with the allied troops during the fall of Berlin, and sketched the ruined city. Back in England, but still in his flight lieutenant's uniform, he met his future wife, Jeannie Tennant, who was a teacher, in Filey, North Yorkshire. They married in 1945 (in Berlin, while on short leave), and spent their honeymoon cycling around the Yorkshire dales.' Soon after meeting Jeannie, he portrayed her enigmatically yet incisively in a wood-engraving, Lancashire Girl, in which her flowing locks are echoed in the sea, rock and cloud shapes all around. The couple lived in rural Sussex, and then moved to Essex (John was Principal of Colchester School of Art from 1948-64 – where his teaching colleagues included John Nash (1893-1977) and Edward Bawden and where, as Fenwick wrote, he 'was an enthusiastic teacher, full of intellectual curiosity; he held that artists had a duty to teach, and that contact with younger artists and students fed the imagination, protecting one from banal isolation. In the staff room, he was remembered for his humour, his approachability and his anecdotes [...] After leaving Colchester in 1964, he was a visiting lecturer at St Martin's School of Art until 1975, and at Glasgow School of Art from 1977 to 1984.'). The O'Connors then lived in Suffolk and, from 1975, as Fenwick recorded, in 'Kirkcudbright, a part of Scotland to which his wife belonged. Here, they found a single-storey farmhouse in which to live with their cats; the byre beside the house was made into a three-room studio [....]'

In contrast to the elaborate decorative qualities of his wood-engravings, O'Connor's more introspective 1960s landscape paintings of reedbanks, rivers, farm tracks and flooded meadows are distinguished by their exhilaratingly pensive poetry of sparse, sometimes magically desolate vistas, described with often ethereally coalescing colours. These are evoked through spontaneous yet sensitive brushwork in an attenuated palette of, often, blacks, greys, whites, sandy yellows and sometimes burnt ochres, as seen, for example, in his undated painting Orange Field (Collection: Clare College, University of Cambridge), in which an expanse of muted orange field is seen hedged in by black vegetation under a pale grey sky illumined by a low white sun.

There is an affinity in approach and feeling in such works with William Crozier's haunting (if viscerally more high-pitched) landscape paintings of the same period based on a sense of cultural exile and remoteness living among the estuary landscapes of Essex. Indeed, the landscape barely glimpsed  through the window in O'Connor's 1963 self-portrait shares something of the raw yet distilled poetic quality of his own (if still, unfairly, critically neglected) pure landscape paintings of the same period.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004