Born in Birmingham, England, in 1936. His Mother was related to Hogan’s from County Cork and he was educated in a school run by the Marist Fathers. After living for twenty years in Cornwall in the far southwest of Britain, he moved in 1982 to an isolated farmhouse on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, Ireland.
The Challenge that faces John every day is one of making his paint reflect his experience of nature as a dynamic all encompassing unity that extends to Man and his inner thoughts and feelings.
In the studio, using his own made up pigments, he mimics the cycle of growth and decay by working with matter in a very direct and hands-on way. He applies colours, deep pools of it, red brick, reds, molten silver and zinc, platinum and titanium, sulphuric yellows and so much more to dozens of paintings in various states of becoming. He paints standing up applying a new layer of paint (finished paintings will comprise of fifty to one hundred or more layers of paint applied over a period of several years and when completed can take up to five months to dry out). His preferred tools are palette knives (one in each hand is the norm), and a decorator’s brush which he holds vertically using a stippling technique. Anyone privileged enough to watch, is struck by the analogy with gardening, for the artist tends his pictures with the same care and devotion.
