Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 29th April 2019

114 92 John Shinnors (b.1950) Roxboro Road Bus Stop III (2008) signed lower right and titled verso oil on canvas 51 x 76cm (20 x 30in) Provenance: Taylor Galleries, Dublin where purchased by the present owner €15,000-€20,000 ($16,853-$22,471) (£12,711-£16,949) A master at finding abstraction in the everyday, John Shinnors is one of Ireland’s best known and most widely liked artists, in part because he does not mystify his work. On the contrary, despite the visual sophistication of his paintings, they are always grounded in the details of daily life - his daily life. Born in Limerick, he is based there still. The one exception to his residency in Limerick was a spell spent travelling in England with a guitar, after attendance at Limerick School of Art under the enlightened charge of the painter Jack Donovan. Donovan’s technical precision, quiet depth of knowledge and mischievous whit all carry through in Shinnors’ distinctive vision. His decisive moment of inspiration came when he had returned from England and was thinking about painting again. One morning his eyes lit on the glitter of mackerel in his local fishmongers. It was, he though, both ordinary and extraordinary. Since then he has applied himself to a form of pictorial alchemy, addressing a number of recurrent motifs - cats, swallows, Fresian cattle, lighthouses, washing on a line , scarecrows - with a deliberately restricted palette. He favours black - five different blacks, though, he remarked once - and white, and tones in between, with the occasional injection, as here, of intense red. This painting is one of a series he made, elegant compositions of rhythmic vertical intervals, from the most unpretentious of sources, a bus stop on Limerick’s Roxboro Road. Aidan Dunne, March 2019