John Caple’s family have been land workers in Mendip since the eighteenth century. He grew up in a close-knit, 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 on, 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, Shelley, Keats and Emily Dickinson, and it was in their poetry that John Caple also found another path into the landscape.
The paintings in this exhibition take their inspiration from Shelley’s poem, The Woodman and the Nightingale, an extraordinary hymn to the beauty of the ancient wilderness. Guided by a nightingale, the artist leads us on a journey through the forests, villages and waterways of these precious places. The ever-present Woodman stands as the guardian of its spirit, expressing the fragility of this landscape, a concern that lies at the heart of Caple’s work.
