John O'Carroll is a British painter and mixed media artist whose work is built on an ancient technique he developed himself: layers of natural pigment, gathered by hand from desert landscapes, combined with layers of wax on panel. The resulting surfaces are minimalist and luminous, capturing something of the vast, unpeopled spaces that have shaped his eye over a lifetime of travel. Precious
metals, including gold, silver, and copper leaf, recur throughout his work, carrying ancient symbolism and interacting with his restricted colour palette to create surfaces that seem to hold and release light. His abstract panoramas and richly pigmented panels sit within the tradition of British and European modernism while remaining, as one writer put it, set free from historical context.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows with Roger Katwijk Gallery in Amsterdam, at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, and at the Dutch-Flemish Institute in Cairo. He contributed to the Colours of Oasis exhibition at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden in 2012, and to the Anthropocene exhibition at the Eden Project in Cornwall. His work is held in corporate collections including Akzo Nobel, Accenture, AMC, and Loyens & Loeff, as well as by the British Embassy in the Netherlands. He has also appeared as a consultant on BBC Four documentary series including Treasures of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Worlds.
Born in Cornwall in 1958 and educated at Cornwall College of Art, O'Carroll spent 23 years as an archaeological illustrator at the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt's Western Desert, an experience that transformed his practice and led him to begin collecting desert pigments to make his own paints. He now divides his time between a studio on the Cornish coast and a winter studio in southern Egypt, and is a resident artist at Circle Contemporary gallery near Padstow. He is also a trustee of the Dakhleh Oasis Project in Egypt.
