Nerys Johnson exhibition promises winter sunshine at the Laing
A new exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery is to open in time for Christmas and it promises to be a winter treat.
The title is a bit dry – Nerys Johnson: Disability and Practice – but the work will be anything but.
Nerys loved flowers and sunshine and colour and it’s all there in the paintings, two dimensional expressions of joie de vivre.
She suffered from Still’s disease, a rare form of arthritis, but you never got any sense of suffering when you met her in public.
Nerys was always cheerful, a force of nature, getting about with great fortitude in her wheelchair.
“If we came to a bridge,” she told me once, recalling a trip to Venice, “there were always plenty of sturdy Venetians to help me negotiate it.”
She was artist-in-residence in the city in 1994 and remembered how the Venetians loved her paintings. Other English painters, they told her, added grey to their palettes to evoke mist and shadows. Nerys liked it sunny and so did they.
Nerys died in 2001, aged 58. Originally from Wales, she’d come to Newcastle to study fine art and became keeper of art at the Laing in 1967 and three years later keeper in charge of the old DLI Museum & Art Gallery in Durham.
After retiring, she focused on the painting that was her passion. In 2022 a large body of her work, including sketchbooks, prints and watercolours, was donated to the Laing by her estate.
The new exhibition will celebrate her life and work while looking at the impact of her disability on her artistic practice.
To complement it, Surface Area Dance Theatre have been commissioned to produce a performance to camera called Down Amongst the Plants.
Julie Milne, chief curator of art galleries for North East Museums, says: “I have long been an admirer of Nerys Johnson’s work. Her jewel-like watercolours of plants are particularly fine and have the clarity and vibrancy of stained-glass windows.
“It is especially pleasing to see her work on display at the Laing Art Gallery, given her talent and the quality of her work.”
The exhibition has been brought together by Rachel Boyd, a collaborative PhD student at Northumbria University, and Laing assistant keeper Amy Pargeter.
Nerys Johnson: Disability and Practice opens in the Barbour Watercolour Gallery on the first floor of the Laing Art Gallery on Saturday, December 21. Admission is free (donations welcome).