In early 1946, when he was 17, John won the RSPB’s Junior Bird Recorders’ Club annual drawing competition. He told me once it was with a picture of a sparrow dust-bathing, so I was particularly delighted to come across this (much later) picture recently. John delighted in observing and drawing bird behaviours. His book Looking […]
Early Works
Farfield Meeting House (and Studio)
Farfield Friends Meeting House near Addingham in West Yorkshire is now in the keeping of the Historic Chapels’ Trust www.hca.org.uk but in the late 1950’s and early 60’s John rented it as a studio at a time when he was unsure whether to stay in Edinburgh (where he was teaching at the Edinburgh College of […]
Birdwatching 75 years ago
Anyone in or around Menston, Yorks, like to re-create this birdwatching walk? It is part of a larger map drawn by John as a teenager in the late 1940’s. Swallows, cuckoos, linnets, willow warblers, skylarks all there then. What would we find today? See original post here
Landscape Looking
John Busby taught for thirty years at the Edinburgh School of Art so I was not surprised to find this handout amongst his papers. Created for his third year Painting and Drawing students it tries to get them to see beyond the merely visual, to really look, with understanding, at the processes that form the […]
Ascent of Pigeons 1952
“I keep pigeons: they’re not pigeons” I found this black and white photo in a scrapbook alongside a newspaper cutting of an exhibition. The reviewer liked the picture ‘for its colour, sense of space and movement. (This in spite of a fancier who insisted on telling me, “I keep pigeons: they’re not pigeons”). Sadly there […]
Twelve Winded Sky – update
I recently came across archive material relating to this big picture and others that John Busby painted in those early years. In my grandfather’s scrapbooks dating back to the 1950’s were newspaper cuttings and exhibition programmes, receipts and letters relating to his son’s early career– a fascinating glimpse into the different world that is […]
1940’s birdwatching map
I recently found this map of various walks around Menston in Yorkshire which John had annotated with delicate drawings of the different species of birds he saw. The family estimate that this was drawn up in the mid 1940’s when John was a teenager. In his book Land Marks and Sea Wings he wrote this about his […]
Twelve Winded Sky
This early oil painting by John Busby was recently returned to the family by the Don Valley Academy in Doncaster where it had been hanging for very many years. The date of the picture, 1956, is the same as the opening of the school so it may have been commissioned for it [See Update]. When the […]
Christ in Glory – mural
This magnificent mural in the Scottish Episcopal Church of St Columbas-by-the-Castle in Edinburgh was painted by John Busby in the late 1950’s. Some digging in the National Records of Scotland office brought to light the vestry minutes at the time the mural was commissioned and a Church Newsletter from April 1981 was unearthed which had […]
Mural Notes by the Artist
St Columba’s Mural Notes by the Artist “The mural was painted in 1959 in place of the original stained glass window, bricked up in 1957. Mark Kemp instigated the original idea and the theme of the painting, though changes were made as the design progressed, under the guidance and encouragement of the new Rector, George […]