John Donaldson - artist

John Donaldson has been a jazz musician, choirmaster, DJ, classical organist and a landscape architect. However, he is now best known for his impressionist art, which he sells across the world. Back in the 90s he was one of the ‘Dartmouth Five’ alongside other artists Simon Drew, Paul Riley, John Gillo and Andras Kaldor. Now he quietly gets on with life, painting in his hillside cottage in Blackawton. Steph Woolvin went to meet him … 

The first drawing I remember doing was of the Queen’s Coronation back in 1953 – I was eight at the time. It was six foot long and on the back of a roll of wallpaper!” John says his family didn’t own a TV, but they rented a small six-inch black and white set, which could only be seen properly if the curtains were drawn and they all sat as close as possible! Most images came from his imagination or the great outdoors. “I wasn’t sure back then if I definitely wanted to be an artist; I just enjoyed drawing and painting. My mother’s father was an artist, so I looked to him for inspiration, but he was a man of few words and wasn’t free flowing with his pearls of wisdom.” 

John’s mother died when he was young, which meant he was sent away from his hometown of Lewes to a boarding school, which, he says, was more like an orphanage than an academic institution, although he did receive a good education. He only had to suffer it for a few years as his father eventually re-married and was able bring him home. He settled back into domestic life and once again became interested in art. He would regularly take to the streets with his watercolours: “When I was 12 and 13 I sat outside pubs painting them. I would then go in and try and sell the picture to the landlord, sometimes successfully. I’d love to think some of my childhood artwork is still hanging up behind bars in Sussex.” Everyone thought an artistic career was the way forward for John, but a hatred of school football meant his interest in art was put on hold. Back then you had to play football unless you had another interest: “I discovered there was an organ in the school chapel, so asked if I could learn it – anything to get out of football. But I actually enjoyed it and instantly got the bug.”  He soon began playing in local churches and led their choirs.  Within a couple of years, at the age of 14, John became the youngest organist and choirmaster in Britain. 

In 1965 John moved from Sussex to Chichester and decided to use his creative skills and become a design and landscape architect – a career which saw him through the next ten years. “It was during this time that I made the move away from the classical organ. The radio was on late at night and tuned into my favourite American station.  Some top class jazz started playing – I was hooked and converted over

night!” John learnt the Hammond organ straight away. He lost his waistcoats and side parting and started indulging in the late night bar scene, spending weekdays in the office and evenings playing in various jazz and soul clubs around Chichester and Brighton with his wife Sandi. In 1975 he, Sandi and daughter Anna got the chance to move down to Devon. “We came down to visit Sandi’s relatives. One day we wandered up Kingsbridge High Street and saw a cottage for sale in Blackawton. We had a look around and immediately put an offer in.” 

When John arrived in Devon he decided to pack up his design job and finally give in to his first love – art. He admits becoming a working artist was very hard at first: “There wasn’t a lot of money to be had. I remember standing outside a Kingsbridge gallery plucking up the courage to go in. I asked the owner to buy some of my work, and he actually said yes! He regularly sold paintings to America and was in need of small pictures of local landscapes – “I’d do one-a-day and sell it for £8.” John’s confidence and skills improved and he soon managed to get his work into other places including a gallery in Mayfair. He recalls how he would meet the owner in various service stations between Devon and London, where he would hand over the paintings in the car park in exchanges that could have been mistaken for illicit deals! “Looking back it was all very informal and ad hoc, but it worked! I had about 20 exhibitions with him over 25 years. We became good friends and we would regularly stay with his family in London and visit fabulous restaurants. You could quickly spot the difference between the income of an artist and that of a West End gallery owner though – his drive littered with top end cars and our rusting campervan tucked between them!”

It was in 1988 that John became a member of the ‘Dartmouth Five’ group of artists. Simon Drew, Paul Riley, John Gillo and Andras Kaldor were already a happy foursome putting on events and exhibitions in Dartmouth and beyond. John had been invited before to join their gang but he says he wasn’t keen: “I was concerned there would be much earnest talk on such things as the relative merits of abstraction and post modernism.” Then one night Kaldor’s wife Sally rang John during one of their meetings and explained that the gang mainly drink and sometimes even eat together! “I was up for that,” John says with a cheery grin. “Sally was very persuasive and I quickly realised it wasn’t just a boys’ club. I was very pleased to be involved, as being an artist is a bit of a solitary business. There was great camaraderie and mutual respect. We had a brilliant time.” They used to put on stunts to promote exhibitions. John played a piano suspended from a ceiling in Hampshire and they once did land-based synchronised swimming behind a blue cloth, wearing bathing hats, trunks and clothes pegs on their noses. The quintet used to go on painting trips to France and could often be found sat by a river under the shade of a tree. 

John’s cosy moss-covered cottage is nestled in the Blackawton hills and each room contains a mixture of finished and unfinished work. When he moved here he fitted neatly into village life, helping out at the local primary where his daughter was a pupil. He also started a church choir: “The vicar was a game old boy and was up for the idea straight away. One Christmas we did Stevie Wonder’s ‘Isn’t she lovely’ but changed it to ‘he’ for the nativity. Loads of people joined and by the end we were doing cathedral quality stuff.” At the Millennium, he and Peter Richardson (of Channel 4’s Comic Strip fame) formed a soul band. Peter was on drums and on one occasion Rik Mayall joined them on lead vocals! When that all finished John became a DJ mixing music in his studio and playing it in pubs and at private parties. He gave it up after a few years, as he couldn’t be bothered to lug the heavy amps and synthesisers around. 

John’s an impressionist painter and says that means you don’t have a message in your work – you just paint what you see, portraying a fleeting effect or a moment in time. He also does a fair bit of abstract art; a style where the end result doesn’t accurately represent what the artist sees – it’s more about how he or she feels about something. It can be just about technique, colour and the look and surface of the paint. But he says abstracts are harder to sell because they are harder to look at. He uses oil paints because, amongst other reasons, he likes the smell! He paints in short spells through the day and often well into the night, stopping only for the odd bit of admin work and food. He usually has seven or eight pictures on the go at any one time and manages to finish between 50 and 70 a year. John says he loves his work, but admits he has trouble getting started each time: “I have many distraction techniques. I will do some unnecessary tidying or rearrange my paints or books, make another drink, clean a window, have a shave! Anything rather than sit down and make the first marks, but once I’ve started you won‘t stop me.”

John has travelled the world in search of new images to paint. He bypasses obvious beauty spots, being drawn instead to unusual views of quiet French flower markets or forgotten Tuscan wooden gates just catching the evening light. Provence, the Cote d’Azur, Liguria, Umbria and Tuscany are some of his favourite places to find inspiration. He says he’s always looking for his next image and an ordinary shopping trip to Totnes can last hours as he loses himself down cobbled back streets considering each archway another potential gem on canvas.

www.johndonaldsonart.co.uk

First published in By The Dart December 2017

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