- Past Exhibitions
- Biographical Information
John Caple - The Heart Of Mendips
25 April - 25 November 2005
The cottage, which was divided from the old meeting house by a narrow lane, was the residence of one George Beacham, a man who passed in the district not only for a cattle doctor but a conjuror. Tradition even credits him with the possession of a wizards staff and magic books….".
Francis Knight The Heart of Mendip, 1915
John Caple was born in 1966. As a painter he is entirely self-taught and as unbothered by contemporary art as he is untroubled by academic training. He has worked out the way he paints entirely for himself: it could not be more straightforward and simple and yet at the same time it is unlike anything else one has ever seen in modern art. Nor is it in any way antique, though his work certainly belongs to that long tradition of English folk art that one sees in medieval church carving, samplers and early English pottery. In the twentieth century that tradition was often confused with naïve art, yet an important distinction exists between the two and that distinction in many ways helps to understand John Caple's work. Whilst a naïve artist paints entirely from their own imagination, an artist like John Caple is expressing stories and sentiments that have a common ownership amongst his village. In the twenty-first century, he is an oddity amongst painters.
John Caple says Mendip is a hard county. His family have farmed and quarried in this corner of Somerset since the eighteenth century and certainly the quarryman's life was - and still is - a tough one. But in this tight community there were remarkable people and their stories were passed down through successive generations. For Caple, the village and the countryside became a backdrop to stories in which characters from earlier generations could seem every bit as familiar as his own family and friends.
Caple's paintings are peopled with characters he knew by word of mouth and through his Great Uncle, Orion Owen Caple, whose written memoirs have remained in his family. Orion Owen Caple also learnt some of the wider history and folk-lore of the Mendips through meeting the antiquarian, Francis Knight, whose books The Heart of Mendip and A Corner of Arcady.were published at the beginning of the last century:
"I used to deliver milk to Wintrath, the home of Francis Knight, and on a few occasions he would open his little glass house door, which was set back in the rockery for to do most of his writing in quiet and peace, and he would invite me inside to have a little chat; as he would put it, to have a few moments relief from writing. He was an interesting old man."
The distance between the oral traditions of solid family history and ethereal mythology emerges in Caple's work. A story-teller in his own right, Caple moulds his medium to his subject-matter uniquely, so that the very fabric of the paintings is steeped both in earthy reality and folkloric otherworldliness.