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 […]
Every picture tells a story
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 […]
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 […]
Drawing the birds from the garden
In 2011, I persuaded Dad to let me video him while he drew the garden birds coming to the bird feeder outside his dining room window. This bird feeder was a magnet for all the small birds in the area, and regularly attracted a wide variety of species. Sitting in comfort at the dining […]