John Maxwell was both a devoted primitive painter and an exacting perfectionist. Perhaps it is this ostensible idiosyncrasy that makes his work so compelling.
Across his career his subject-matter remained unusually consistent, and the focus with which he repeatedly painted plants, flowers and creatures suggests he felt he was drawing ever-closer to revealing an essential truth about the natural world. Yet in Maxwell’s hands the natural world undergoes a creative metamorphosis, becoming stranger, wilder and more vivid, as if bewitched.
The Maxwell family owned a cinema in rural Kirkcudbrightshire, and one can speculate how, as a boy, John’s imagination was stimulated alternately by the awesome expansiveness of the Galloway landscape and the technicolour visions projected on the silver screen. (see McClure, D., John Maxwell, University of Edinburgh Press, Edinburgh, 1976, p.4) An Edinburgh College of Art travelling scholarship conveyed Maxwell to Spain, France and Italy in the mid-1920s, where he was awakened to new possibilities of expression by Byzantine Icons and the Italian Primitives. (McClure, D., op.cit., p.10)
