John’s Sketchbooks
Throughout his time as a professional artist, mainly from the 1960s to the 2010s, John filled nearly 400 sketchbooks with drawings in pencil, ink, chalk and pastel. He often labeled his sketchbooks in significant detail, organising them by letter, number and date.
John wrote a letter on the cover of most books which referred to the category of art it contained. Sketchbooks with “L” contained Life Drawing and “S” contained Sketches. Both these style of books were used mainly during the art classes he taught at Camden Art Centre. In the snatched moments between lecturing and helping his students, John would sketch the model of the day to use as reference for the human figure when creating his final drawings and paintings later down the line.
Other sketchbooks he labeled “E” for Experimental. These pages are be filled with working drawings, usually in colour. John used these development drawings to outline the core shapes and colours of his final pieces. On John’s later works from the 1990s onwards, he would sometimes add a 4 digit reference number on the front of the picture. The first two numbers refer to the experimental sketchbook and second two numbers refer to the specific page John referenced to create that final piece.
Upon John’s death the difficult decision was made as to what to do with all his sketchbooks. The final decision was to keep a third of the most important and representative ones as a historical archive of John’s development process. The rest were disbound and eradicated. However, a small number of the best and most interesting working drawings from the eradicated sketchbooks were carefully removed and kept. Some of those wonderful sketchbook pages have now been mounted with photo corners onto A5 card and are available for purchase right here on his shop!
Above Image:
Collection of John’s sketchbooks from the 1970s - 2000s