John was a fearless colourist; and a great legacy of his was his forthright use of colour without any obvious suggestions or allusions of place – I know he was relaxed if anyone perceived any such inference and sometimes his ordinance survey titling of a painting could send you north of the border in reverie. His paintings, though, are really about pictorial relationships: mini plays with responsive ‘actors’ playing out a pictorial drama – there’s never a lazy line or an incomplete character portrayal; they are very poised and deft – that’s why people wax lyrical on their humanity, as they are so relatable and generous in spirit.
The work gradually looked less lyrical after he returned from his time in America, with areas of flatter colour, inflected through their handling, which pivoted against one another, rather than the previous “signature works” with seductive brushstrokes in colour chords, floating on washy, atmospheric grounds. His great friend, the Canadian painter, Bill Perehudoff was working similarly at the time in this sequential and slightly formulaic way and it comes out of Jack Bush – the “figure-ground” sensibility, which I presume John had fully assimilated through his frequent visits to western Canada. He told me at one point he thought Bill the best painter alive. I think he found his true voice though when he got past this influence.
His work developed into more emphatic coloured areas and smaller eccentric shapes, quasi-geometries with sectioned spaces and brushy glyphs. At first, I thought some of them were too decorative – especially if there was a spiral in them; they seemed to be too obviously looking for the finish line. The best of them though, use a dark/light contrast as a spine for the colour, and the black never drops off; it’s always energised, which is a litmus test for a colourist.
I used to do a lot of framing for him when I was starting out, and he’d be making subtle edging decisions. He’d look at how shapes spoke to the sides and particularly the corners to restate the tautness of the surface. He used shape as the main vehicle for colour; facture became more important over the years too. The final ones he was making (truly astounding in light of his physical incapacity) revisited his earlier more lyrical palette: vibrato handling in medium-suspended transparencies but now allied with harder, abrupt edges and scrapes into flat, metallic pigment-infused areas, which contrast with jostling strokes — the use of line as a structuring device possibly came out of his printmaking. He had a cunning sense of space and used line and stroke in nuanced ways to set up junctions, dialogues or suggest more discrete pockets of space within the whole.
I’ve read lots of analogies to music and dance circulating about his paintings; but if you really want to get John’s work, I think something he used to say about his aspiration for a painting is the most revealing: ‘Painting is like drumming’. Look again at his paintings, and see that shock of the colour, how it maximises the surface tension: ‘We break the waters’, he used to say. He was very reluctant to go on the record about this; I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him now.
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