Roots in Sheffield

Made in Sheffield: Johnny, Paul, Phil, Gill.

The back-cloth to Johnny's birth in 1940 is war-time, industrial Sheffield. With his father away at war, the first seven years of his life were spent with his mother’s family in the village of Wortley, set in idyllic countryside outside Sheffield.

At the end of the war, Johnny met his father and the idyll was replaced by the grim reality of life in Dalton, on the outskirts of Rotherham; a hardworking, harsh environment, where most lads’ futures lay down the coal mine or at the steel works and not in lofty halls of learning.  In that stark reality, Johnny’s independent nature was fostered.

‘My father didn’t give me much,’ he reminisces, ‘but he had a room full of books – all early English water colours and I used to go and look at them.  They were an escape from my reality – which wasn’t too good.  I was ten and beginning to be aware, without understanding why, that for some reason, I didn’t fit in.’

A means of escape

The family moved to Bridlington when Johnny was thirteen and during the turbulence of the break-down of his parent’s marriage, his constant companion and escape was his developing passion for art.  By sixteen, he was captivated by the Impressionists and their vivid world.  ‘Artists were portrayed leading wonderful lives of romance and being hard-up and I wanted to be part of it.  I knew I wasn’t going to find it in the Bridlington of the late fifties, so I moved to Leeds and the West Indian community in Chapel Town – my first fascinating taste of a vibrant, different culture.’

He survived by labouring on building sights, painting in every spare moment and visiting galleries to study the works of artists.  The misfit boy who hated school was transforming into the man who uses his paintings to try and make some sense of it all.

In the late 1960s Johnny had settled in Harrogate and was on his way to establishing a career and reputation in the contemporary art world: teaching, lecturing and exhibiting.  However, by 1972 he was struggling to manage the tensions between mounting, external career pressures and his deeply introspective self.  Contemporary art was moving away from the influences of painting and drawing, both of which are fundamental disciplines for Johnny and he eventually withdrew from the outside world to devote himself entirely to painting without compromise.