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
Early Works
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 […]
Commissioning of the mural in St Columba’s by the Castle 1959
Notes from the Vestry minutes 1957-1960 With the stained glass in the original East Window of St Columba’s in a very poor state of repair, the church considered three options: to repair the glass (at the huge cost of £500), to fill in the windows making a complete East wall for a mural or wooden […]