John King is a figurative artist whose expressive paintings explore the relationship between observation, colour, light and darkness, moving between the human figure and the intensity of the natural world.
John King’s interest in art began early, studying A-level Art and progressing to the Art Foundation at West Mansfield College before beginning a BA in Fine Art at Newcastle Polytechnic. Family responsibilities led him to leave the course and spend three years working in the mining industry. He later returned to education, completing a BA combining Illustration and Fine Art at Bradford College.
John’s practice has developed alongside employment and family life, creating an ongoing tension between art as a livelihood and art as a passion. He currently works for a non-profit organisation supporting adults with learning disabilities and runs regular life-drawing and painting classes in the Chesterfield area.
Drawing and painting the human figure have long been central to his work. His approach to life drawing is rooted in sustained observation, using repeated looking and mark-making to explore proportion, character and the relationship between artist and subject.
Since 2016, John has also developed a series of large-scale paintings of flower meadows, marking a significant departure from his focus on the figure. These paintings combine vivid colour and energetic, deliberately visible brushwork with deep greens and near-black shadows.
The darkness within these works is as significant as the flowers themselves. Rather than simply forming a background, it creates a sense of depth and ambiguity, allowing the intense reds, oranges and greens to emerge with greater force. The flowers appear to push through the darkness, creating a tension between beauty and hardship, light and shadow, the visible and the unseen.
This contrast reflects an important quality within John’s wider practice. His work does not seek to eliminate uncertainty or difficulty; instead, it allows them to remain visible. The darkness becomes part of the beauty, giving the flowers their intensity and presence. What initially appears as a celebration of colour gradually reveals a more complex meditation on light, resilience and the experience of looking.