John Caple b. 1966
“In a world in which we can feel increasingly disenchanted from the earth, I wanted to think about the search for re-enchantment and a simpler wildness within us. It is perhaps that small wilderness within that shapes our relationship to the macrocosm, and so ultimately shapes the world we live in.”
John Caple
John Caple’s family have been land workers in Mendip since the eighteenth century. He grew up in a close, rural community in which family stories and folk traditions were passed down through successive generations and which were to become the inspiration for his earliest paintings. Twenty-five years later, John Caple’s art remains woven into the landscape and history of Somerset as well as the rich tradition of poetry, folklore and magic that has held firm in Mendip. These are paintings built on the collective memory of generations who shared a profound connection to the natural world. It was their voice which resonates through the poetry of Coleridge, who lived on the Quantock Hills, Wordsworth and then Shelley, Keats and Emily Dickinson and it was in their poetry that John Caple turned to find another way of reaching into the landscape, most recently in exhibitions that used Shelley’s visionary language as a starting point for his paintings.
John Caple has exhibited with the John Martin Gallery in London for over 20 years. In 2011 he completed a cycle of three triptychs based on A Midsummer’s Night Dream for the Glyndebourne Festival. His works is held in collections throughout the world.
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The Walking Stick Man, 2022View more details -
A Solitude, 2021View more details
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That Gleam of a Remoter world, 2021View more details
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The Sojourn, 2021View more details
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The Wilderness has a mysterious tongue, 2021View more details
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To Visit The Soul, 2021View more details
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Visitor at Dusk, 2021View more details
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In The Pathless Woods
John Caple 9 Nov - 10 Dec 2021The paintings in the this exhibition are images that were suggested by lines from three poems, two by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind and Mont Blanc, and...Read more -
Silence and Twilight
John Caple 6 - 30 Jun 2019The exhibition begins on midsummer’s eve and the magical descent into a summer’s night. It was the time when divinations revealed what the darker months of winter might bring: visions...Read more -
Of Gardens Long Run Wild
John Caple 2 - 25 Nov 2017I hoped to produce a series of paintings which would explore a relationship to both nature and mystery. In a world in which we can feel increasingly disenchanted from the...Read more
