John Sheehan

Although derived from the landscape, “Sheehan’s work resists genre classification. His art traverses the liminal spaces between the tangible natural world, and something else that is related, but separate from the hard reality of matter and objects. This indefinable otherness exists in the abstracted elements of his paintings – the shifting shapes, forms and fragmented colours that fill up the canvas, through which recognisable forms such as a tree, horizon line or small landscape vignette emerge”. (Marguerite Brown – Trouble magazine 2011)

John Sheehan’s initial attempts at abstracted landscapes were during his earliest art school days (1991 - 93) when he studied under Philip Hunter, Victor Majzner and Ian Parry. Then, for a decade (1994 – 2003) the landscape of Chinaman’s Hill in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburb of Park Orchards provided his primary focus, acting as a structure through which the artist developed his meditative painterly vocabulary. His more recent paintings (2010 to 2015) have delved deeper into abstraction with strident colour and deep resonant fields evoking strong emotive responses.   

Sheehan has most recently shown a series of more than 20 watercolours in a London solo exhibition titled, "The Unknown Way" (Feb/Mar 2015).