The Aldabra Clean-up Project have these, the last complete set of John Busby’s Aldabra lithographs for sale. Please contact the ACUP if you would like to buy any of them. You can follow the progress of the team at Facebook /AldabraCleanUp or at Twitter @AldabraCleanUp You can see other Aldabra paintings and drawings by John […]
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Aldabra – then and now
In early 1974 John Busby had the chance to join his friend, the zoologist Bryan Nelson, for a few weeks on Aldabra, a large atoll in the Indian Ocean, north of Madagascar, between the Seychelles and the African mainland, 9 degrees south of the equator. At the time Aldabra was run by the Royal Society […]
Card stocks running low
If you are looking to have some John Busby cards from this website, do act soon: Mallard Set – only 3 left Seabird Set – only 4 left Collared Dove set – plenty for the moment cost £10 per set including p&p in the UK (£17 for any two sets, £22 for any three) Order […]
‘The Herald’ series
In the late 1990’s John Busby did a series of small ‘greyscale’ watercolours for The Herald newspaper in Scotland. Each was of a single species of bird and was used for the ‘Birdwatch’ column in the Saturday edition. Some of the articles can still be found in The Herald archive [search for “Birdwatch” before 2000] […]
Master Wildlife Artist 2009
In 2009 John Busby was honoured by the prestigious Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin, USA, becoming their Master Wildlife Artist for that year. The museum has run its flagship Birds in Art exhibition since 1976 attracting the very best wildlife art from the USA and internationally, but a Master is not designated every […]
Gannets on the Bass Rock – Watercolour
One of the exciting aspects of gradually opening drawers and exposing hidden corners in John Busby’s studio is finding stunning works like this. No, it’s not the famous Gannets on the Bass Rock, an oil that has been exhibited many times and appears in Land Marks and Sea Wings (p59) but a watercolour. The oil was one of […]
Garden birds on a bird feeder
This was a favourite subject matter for Dad, but usually executed in characteristically free-flowing pencil drawings and watercolour. This is a rare oil painting on the subject. A peanut feeder has hung on the wire balustrade outside the dining room window since the house was built, feeding many generations of robins, chaffinch, nuthatches, a great […]
Landscape for a Hunting Kestrel
Very many of Dad’s big landscapes put the viewer on a high point looking down, often looking across from one side of a valley to the other, or in the case of the many rock pool paintings, looking vertically down. Here we are so high above the landscape looking down that we have no view […]
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 […]