Thinking of John on his 90th birthday....

From infancy until shortly before his death at the age of eighty-four, John’s thoughts were occupied with capturing what he observed around him. It was a desire awakened as a small child when he watched the shadows from the gas-mantle bubbling across his bedroom ceiling and wanted to record them somehow. The compulsion remained with him for life. In the late summer of 2017 as he sat in bed watching his wife RoseMary sewing in the fading evening light, John asked for a pencil and paper; it was a few days before he died and was to be his last drawing. Between those two moments lie a whole lifetime’s work devoted to capturing subjects that drew his eye; countless drawings and hundreds of oil and watercolour paintings.