One of the first lessons I learned as a student at the Courtauld Institute of Art (where John and I met in the early 1960s) was that no first-rate art is born of a second-rate intelligence. And you didn‘t have to be in John’s company long before being struck by the brilliant originality of his mind. He never seemed to be anything other than vitally attentive to whatever was to hand. Not in all the years I knew him did he say anything that was superfluous. Even when he was silent he emitted a mental energy that was palpable. His conversation was supple and lithe, hopping from solemnity to hilarity and back again without missing a beat, always spiked with observations so sharp they never failed to jolt one's own lazy preconceptions. Then there were those moments of gloriously unashamed salaciousness accompanied by hoots of laughter.
His painting has all the character of those conversations. The sounds of different voices, the careful weighing of ideas, the moments of blazing intuition, the occasional clash of temperament. Although he is described as an abstract painter he liked occasionally to kick against such lazy pigeon-holing, to introduce the abstract to the figurative, for example, and wait to see how they would get along - or not. Intimations of a fish, a leaf, a bird, even a gold Christmas paper crown, stand their ground against the forces of determinedly abstract shapes and swirls of colour. Nature in its multifarious forms seems never entirely absent and that slippage between the real and the abstract world gives his painting its powerful emotional edge (cold was never a colour on his mental spectrum). He had the whole human range of feeling in his sights, from the quietly elegiac to shouts of unrestrained joy.
London
September, 2019
