John Beard's Qualia
- Paul McGillick
- Jan 4
- 5 min read
John Beard’s recent exhibition of new (and some older) work at Messums West, Tisbury in the U.K. (closed 24/11/25) was, as one always expects with John, both innovative and a continuing exploration of long established concerns.
One notable change was the generally small scale of the paintings – the largest being Sidmouth Coastline, Looking East (2025) at 110x138 cm, with several Sydney Harbour views from 2021, at roughly 51x61 cms, the rest smaller. This overall small scale gave rise to a sense of intimacy, a feeling which was reinforced by the majority of the work using watercolour as its medium.
We had something of a preview when we visited John and Wendy at their home just outside Axminster in Devon last October. A lot of the work had already gone off for framing, but there was still some to see in John’s studio, and I had seen some of the Sydney paintings at the time of his last exhibition in Sydney.
John and Wendy’s vintage home is essentially a two-storey ‘railway carriage’ typology, elongated and basically one room deep. It reminded me of Monet’s house at Giverny which we had just visited, also a ‘railway carriage’ lay-out with its combination of cosiness and connection to the semi-rural outside. The grace and simplicity of the house – along with its casual, perambulatory plan – engenders a sense of belonging, even for the casual visitor.
But the house is sublimely complemented by its rear garden which begins as a partly enclosed space behind the house before spilling out and opening up to become an expansive lawn trimmed by flowers and shrubs, and partly bordered on one side by John’s studio.
Passing from the small space behind the house, one’s eyes are immediately drawn to the new expanse and then to the prospect of an astonishing westerly view – as from a ha-ha – to the Dorset hills and valleys, a view perfectly framed by sentinel trees.
Which brings me to the show, because the garden is the ‘muse’ to John’s recent exhibition. More precisely, it is his experience of the garden which offers the key to the work and how we should approach it. Not that all the work was of the garden. But I suspect that the garden and John’s response to it have triggered a fresh interrogation of his painter’s eye. It is this interrogation which forms what I will term John’s ‘project’.
It’s easy to assume that painters always know what they are doing. But often they are driven by questions such as: what am I doing, why am I doing it and what is the significance of this stuff that I have produced? At the end of the day, painting is a process which objectifies another process – namely, how sight becomes vision, or insight into the nature of the world we live in and how we inhabit it.
Which brings me to the title of the show – Qualia.
Titles to exhibitions are not always helpful and are often redundant. But in this case the title is not just a clue to how to look at the pictures, but it actually sheds light on what I call John’s career-long project, which has been to explore that tenebrist space between what we know and what we experience. Which is why the work invariably evinces a constant tension between abstraction and figuration.
And hence the title of the show, because qualia is a phenomenological term referring to examples of how we subjectively experience the world. To take as an example the rose paintings in the exhibition: they are not depictions of the roses in John’s garden, but visual analogues of how he has subjectively experienced the roses.
The same applies to his wonderfully atmospheric paintings of Sydney Harbour and of the rugged sandstone headlands of the coastline beyond the Harbour. We may recognise what is depicted in these paintings, but more importantly they elicit the experience of the Harbour, of roses or of the coastline and sea around Lyme Regis, not far from where John and Wendy live.
To emphasise the continuity of John’s project, there was a clutch of studies from the Adraga series of paintings, dating back to the mid-1990s when he and Wendy were living in Sintra in Portugal. These were paintings of the Adraga Rock. John was fascinated by the constantly changing visual presentation of the Rock as the sea surged around it – hiding it, revealing it, distorting it. You can see it for yourself by going to the video I made for SBS TV, John Beard in Portugal, on this website.
The fugitive quality of the Rock was a phenomenon John has long explored in his portraits of family, fellow artists and others – he won the 2007 Archibald Prize with his portrait of artist, Janet Laurence.
We ask ourselves: what is this rock and how can I know this thing when it is constantly changing? Similarly, when we look at another person – even ourselves – we ask ourselves: who is this person whose face is never still, never set, a mask hiding the real person or simply the constantly morphing reality of a person? Hence, with his portraits we are forced to peer through a kind of miasma, trying to see the real person – just as we find ourselves trying to look past the ceaselessly roiling ocean in order to try to grasp the reality of the Adraga Rock.
It may seem trite to point out that a painting is not a photograph. It is not an evidentiary artefact, but an act of the imagination. Even the most the most ‘realistic’ painting is an imaginative act. What we see is not a mechanically produced image, but a complex imaginative construct. In so far as we can talk about visual knowledge, it is essential to understand that this is aesthetic knowledge, not the discursive knowledge afforded by language.
John Beard’s painting has long been an exploration of this kind of knowledge and experience, a project exploring the relationship between what we know and what we
see, between the object and the experience. Qualia was the most recent iteration of this concern. Typically, the work seen in this exhibition found new ways of progressing John’s long-term project – basically, an interrogation of painting itself.
But if it were no more than an interrogation of painting, the work would run the risk of intellectualising the experience of actually looking at painting. Hence, he typically defamiliarises the act of looking, forcing the viewer to cast off assumptions and so avoid the risk of taking the act for granted. He has done this in a variety of genres, including landscape. And for a discussion of this strategy, look at John Beard – The Restless Eye on this website, written on the occasion of his previous exhibition at Messums West.
For the moment, however, we can celebrate the continuing innovation which underpins John’s ongoing project.
