‘…the fairest flowers o’ th’ season
Are our carnations and streaked gillyvors
Which some call nature’s bastards…’
The Winter’s Tale’, Perdita, Act 4, Scene 4, Lines 96-99


There is always a polemical question as to nature and artifice when it comes to painting, never more so perhaps than when it concerns depictions or purported representations of the natural world through landscape. The paintings of Michael Canning are pictured exemplum, they create an intended synthesis of the natural as seen and the imagined expressively speculated. The plant paintings of recent years focus on the margins (‘en marge'), on the peripheral purlieu of natural plant and landscape settings. The plants sometimes weed-like floral vegetation(s) are presented foreground, whilst in the hinterland rear encompass evocative atmospheric moods envisioned and expressed by crepuscular moments or opalescent auroral daylight. The plants are highly stylized ocular tropes valorising that which usually passes for the marginally ignored and neglected. Canning is less concerned with actual taxonomic or botanical presentation, but rather he stresses qualities of uncultivated nature, in opposition to cultivated flora whose existence is the product of manipulative hybridization and forced mutation by human intervention.
The artist was born and lives and works in the City of Limerick (Gaelic: Luimneach) located on the banks of the River Shannon, in the ancient Kingdom of Munster. This in turn serves as his primary (if somewhat abstracted) source material for motifs and generic subject matter. This said the actual landscapes of the region are known for verdant valleys and glacial passes, with gorge-like canyons of exceptional beauty. It is ironic then that the artist has reduced his chosen environment to that of an anonymous atmospheric simplicity. In tone (if not in terms of material expression) it evokes place yet denies any sense of identifiable specificity. One might be reminded of the marginal rural byways of the famous Irish painter Jack B. Yeats, which is to say not that Canning draws on the same use of subject matter specifically, but shares in Yeats’ sense of intuitive resonance existing between the painter and his subject matter. All the more empathic given the artist initially trained as a sculptor, yet embraces a planar approach in his paintings applying optical caesura between the foregrounded plant image and the rear ground horizon line.
Another striking aspect of Canning’s chosen landscape-based plants is that while they can be said to have a low marginal status in terms of their botanical value, the foregrounded sentinel-like presentations edges them towards acerbic monumentality. Thus, far from an inert or static presence commonly associated with monumental images, his weeds at the periphery give off a charged feeling of presentational dignity. It is through the elevation of the commonplace, the hidden visible(s) often trampled underfoot, that the artist reveals a highly personal and introspective painting practice. We can call it an introspective viewpoint, because his plant-based landscapes are images of the mind as much as they are the eye’s purview of a surrounding natural world. In works like The Complete Stranger or The Heavy Light (2026) we see this mental-visual verity brought to fruition, intoned by the low horizon and permeated by an atmospheric light. And lest we forget the Sun sets in the West, attuned to the glorious sunsets in this part of Ireland.

– Mark Gisbourne, Juni 2026