John Blandy paints on site, revisiting places time and again, to build up a body of work through the seasons. He challenges himself to see things afresh and to find ways to depict them anew. This gives form to an evolving response over time.
Blandy has been working in and around Wytham for many years, much of the time based beside the Seacourt Stream. Since 2015, he has also focused on trees as an artist-in-residence in Wytham Wood. Each year he has followed a different iconic tree through the seasons: hornbeam, two different oaks, a beech, and an ash. His subject this year is another study of an ash at the edge of Rough Common.
John Blandy currently represents himself.
CV: A graduate of the Royal College of Art, John Blandy has lived and worked in Queens Park for over forty years. Blandy has been represented by the Francis Kyle Gallery, and Cassian De Vere Cole, London. Since 2017, he has exhibited in Oxfordshire Artweeks; in ‘Identities’ in Corby; in “Drawn to London”, Bermondsey Project Space. He is a Founder Member of The Arborealists in 2013, exhibiting with them in Sante-Croix de Ludun, France; The Turbine House Gallery, Reading; The Young Gallery, Salisbury; The RWA in Bristol. In 2021, Blandy has exhibited in “Being with Trees” in Bermondsey Project Space, and at the Gustavo Bacarisas Gallery in Gibraltar. And in June 2021: a Solo show: Pillars of the Forest, Portraits of Trees in Wytham Wood at The Barn Gallery, St John’s College, Oxford University.
Series of his work are in the collections of Hammersmith Hospital and St George’s
Hospital, Tooting. And in various combinations of series in many private collections.