PART II: JOHN DEVLIN ON THE IDEA OF A “COSMIC UNIVERSITY”
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First exhibited in Halifax from September 2015 to January 2016, and now on view at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s Yarmouth location, Spring in Cambridge: the Visionary Drawings of John Devlin features works by the Nova Scotian artist from an outsider perspective charting the physical, emotional, and spiritual world.Devlin recently wrote about his experience of bringing his vision to life (see Part I here) – read Part II & see new works by the artist below.
Born in Halifax, Devlin began his studies in environmental design at Dalhousie University at TUNS faculty of architecture. He went on to study theology at Cambridge University in England in the fall of 1979; however, by spring of 1980 he had his first encounter with mental illness so his studies were cut short and he left a world of architectural antiquity for his hometown to receive specialized care.
Devlin began a creative journey after numerous years in and out of hospitals, discovering that using simple artist tools he could create a different kind of place. So began his construction of a utopian city, inspired by his memories of England, imaginatively re-invented, based on hidden codes, symbols and mathematical ratios, of an imaginary island in Minas Basin, Nova Scotia. This would be his new Cambridge, or Nova Cantabrigiensis.
John Devlin, fan-vault design for chapel with staggered buttresses no. 1120, 21 July 2016, digital image, collection the artist
Heavenly Bodies: Genesis of a Cosmic University
The fertile period 1984-88 during which I produced several hundred drawings and collages came to a grinding halt in 1989 when I was hospitalized for depression and anxiety. My brain needed a rest, especially from March 1988 which was a time of furious activity. When I took up my pen again it was to begin a long march through a hostile land. In time I began to produce many arid, sterile studies of a rectilinear King’s chapel in Cambridge, trying to pick up where I left off just before I fell ill in ’89.
Fast forward to 2016: I am producing more studies of the chapel, but it turns into an annulus – the east end bending back on itself and meeting the west to produce a circular church, like the mythical serpent eating its tail. Kekulé’s Dream. There are other changes: I alter my media from simple child’s crayons and markers on cheap paper to India ink, Photoshop and giclée printing. I borrow ideas from analogue photography, and experience a keen revival of interest in my teenage astronomical explorations of the heavens. And I start to post on social media.
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John Devlin, naked-eye astronomy no. 1127, 1 August 2016, mixed media on paper, 21.59 x 27.94 cm., collection the artist.
The unconscious, naïve manner of ’84-’88 is reluctantly jettisoned as interest in my work grows in a few galleries and the art brut community – mainly in Europe. With consciousness comes some inevitable corruption, and with that the unexpected silver lining of growth as a serious adult contemporary artist with an outsider background. There’s no going back.
As I post images on social media I discover that there is more interest in the works which are inverted with colours on a black background. So I start to draw ‘negatives’ on white paper as if I were once again processing photos of the stars and planets in a tank, and printing the negatives: this time using not photographic paper and enlarger, but Photoshop and digital prints. I experiment with colour: how it appears when inverted and how to draw negatives to create the desired effect. It is always exciting to click ‘invert’: I never know exactly what will appear, or how it will look. The result is a quantum leap from the Earthly King’s chapel in the Minas Basin city, to what I call the Cosmic King’s: blobs of colour floating above deep sky objects – the spiral nebulæ I used to observe through a refractor telescope in my parents’ backyard.
John Devlin, naked-eye astronomy no. 1128, 1 August 2016, digital image, collection the artist
This for me is an inspired return to my roots pre-illness: when I observed the stars, and then photographed them – developing the film, and producing prints in trays of chemicals in an improvised darkroom in our house.
The early drawings of a utopian Cambridge in spring have now evolved into celestial views of a cosmic universal Body translated to the stars, after the manner of the myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I loved before I loved the Bible, and which I studied during four years of Latin in high school.
– John Devlin, August 10, 2016
Spring in Cambridge: the Visionary Drawings of John Devlin is on view at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s Yarmouth location until November 13, 2016.
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