John Caple b. 1966

John Caple’s family have been land workers in Mendip since the eighteenth century. He grew up in a close, rural community in which family stories and folk traditions were passed down through successive generations and which were to become the inspiration for his earliest paintings. Twenty-five years later, John Caple’s art remains woven into the landscape and history of Somerset as well as the rich tradition of poetry, folklore and magic that has held firm in the Mendip.  These are paintings built on the collective memory of generations who shared a profound connection to the natural world. It was their voice which resonates through the poetry of Coleridge, who lived on the Quantock Hills, Wordsworth and then Shelley, Keats and Emily Dickinson and it was in their poetry that John Caple turned to find another way of reaching into the landscape, most recently in exhibitions that used Shelley’s visionary language as a starting point for his paintings.