Bytheway - Pedagogická fakulta MU - Masarykova univerzita

Y JOHN SIMS
JOHN SIMS
1969/72 – Graphic design and illustration at Folkestone School of Art
1972/75 – Illustrator and graphic designer, London
1975/78 – Art director, Kuwait and Qatar
1978/84 – Art director / partner Intergraphics, Bahrain
1985/95 – Art director, Kent
1995/2002 – Freelance illustrator / graphic designer
2000 – Began stone carving
2002/06 – Canterbury Christ Church University, BA Sculpture
Current – Freelance sculptor
Exhibitions
2005 – Two man show St. Augustines Abbey, Canterbury
2005 – Group Show Cleary Gallery, Canterbury
2005 – One man show St. Peter’s Church, Canterbury
2006 – Group show Canterbury Cathedral
LONG JOURNEY BETWEEN ISLANDS
CHILDHOOD, FAMILY AND NATURE
I was born in 1952 in the Cathedral City of Canterbury in the
county of Kent in the south east corner of England. Canterbury
is a small city with a big history. My family, working class, my father
a milkman since leaving the army at the end of WWII. I had
an older sister and two younger brothers. Art never featured in
my childhood, it was simply not something that was considered,
remote from our day to day lives. Nature on the other hand was
very much a part of our lives, we never had any spare cash as
a family but I don’t remember really being aware of this. I do
remember well the seemingly endless summers and walks into
the countryside around Canterbury. My mother was from a farm
workers family, her father travelled around Kent from farm to
farm seeking employment, working with heavy horses in a world
that had not changed for centuries. A life that was about to be
swept away as the tractor took over from the horse in food production.
Mother seemed to know all the names of birds, plants
and animals and I guess this was the greatest gift that she
passed on to me. As soon as I got out from school my friends
and I would be off to the woods, orchards, water meadows and
river or lakes.
School I mostly hated, my yearly reports always ended with
John must try harder to concentrate. Art was OK and I enjoyed
history, geography and religious studies, I would be lost in the
stories, my imagination carrying me away to distant lands. The
dates or anything involving numbers though would have me
struggling...I hated and feared them. At age nine I could barely
read and my grasp of arithmetic was minimal. My school punished
or helped me by making me do extra maths on a Friday
afternoon when the rest of the class had art, It never worked.
In a similar way my mother stopped me from going to Saturday
morning cinema with my friends to practice spelling and reading
on a blackboard in the kitchen...this did work, I was reading
fl uently within three weeks and never looked back. Reading be-
Work for sale at Castle Arts, Canterbury – www.castlearts.co.uk | http://sculptureinstone.com
* 1952 Canterbury
jscyprus@hotmail.co.uk
came one of my greatest pleasures on those wet winter days
and dark evenings, some novels but more often nature books.
It was around this time that I began drawing birds and animals,
copying them from books borrowed from the library. We had
few books in the house, though oddly now, I do remember being
drawn to reproductions of carvings of the winds by Eric
Gill and Jacob Epstein in an encyclopaedia of some kind.
Time passed, mostly happily. On to senior school with much
a Goddess V
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