Born in Newry in 1961, John attended the Abbey Christian Brothers Grammar School and spent a further four years at Huddersfield Polytechnic. For the first year John studied an art and design foundation course and then progressed for a further three years doing a graphic and advertising design course. After graduating in 1984 John spent the next four years living and working in Belfast. A fantastic opportunity arose for John in America when he was offered an eighteen month placement on a treatment programme in Lynn Massachussetts for emotionally disturbed adolescents. The next year and a half was spent working and living in Salem, Massachussetts, New England.

This time in Salem included a period where John\’s interest in drawing buildings thrived and it was then that John developed his unique style of drawing through the mediums of pen and inks. The local street scenes were the inspiration for John and he produced a set of twelve black and white drawings which unfortunately were left behind in his relocation back to Ireland when his visa expired.

Returning to Newry in 1992, John worked on a series of black and white drawings which were included in an exhibition at the local Newry Arts Centre in August 1993. This gave John the chance to show his fellow Newry friends how he had developed and mastered his unique talent and style.

Over the ensuing fourteen years John concentrated solely with working in oils, exhibiting in a Carlingford Art Gallery where much of the work sold until the closure of the gallery in 2003. John continued his work in oils with exhibitions in Newry and Belfast, but his sights were now set on a different approach to his technique, incorporating acrylics as a faster drying medium and using Swiss made Caran Dache coloured pencils for the drawings.

Nowadays John prefers to work on cartridge paper with brushes and not canvas with palette knife as he explains is because \”I like building up layers of colour which is dry in minutes and not weeks, which enables me to work faster and create more artwork and these results have been quite successful. With a preference for painting in strong reds, oranges and blues, the basic primary colours, silhouetting a range of buildings including churches, castles, standing stones, ruins and well known buildings against a contrasting sky and with my trademark window light in many of the buildings the works are produced far more effectively\”.

John has been working full-time in the private sector since 1992, five days a week and only gets the opportunity to paint at weekends and evenings and is intending, in the not to distant future, to fulfil his ultimate ambition of becoming a full-time painter.

Currently John is working on his next collection which is based on the historical buildings of the City of Salem in America such as the house of the Seven Gables (made famous by Nathaniel Hawthorne), the Jonathan Corwin House (better known as the Witch House), the Witch Museum, the Custom House, Salem Town Hall, the Essex Institute, the Peabody Museum and the Burying Point to name but a few.

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