Hubbard, John
John Hubbard was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut, the USA in 1931. He entered Harvard University to read English literature but became interested in art while visiting Boston Museum and enjoying its wonderful collection of Chinese art and switched to Fine Art in 1951. After graduation, John was conscripted into the US Army and served in counterintelligence in Japan from 1953 to 1956 where he studied Japanese and broadened his knowledge of Oriental art developing an interest in calligraphy, man-made landscapes and gardens and a passion for Japanese screens.
He enrolled at Art Students League in New York in 1956 studying under George Grosz (1893-1959) and Morris Kantor (1896-1974) which laid the foundation to his way of thinking and looking and also attended Hans Hoffman’s Summer School in Provincetown, Massachusetts which gave him useful teachings in drawing and helped his development as an independent artist.
John sailed to England where he visited St Ives and from where he travelled to Europe in 1958. He rented a studio in Rome and exhibited in a different gallery but at the same time as Willem de Kooning (1904 – 1997) who came to see his show and liked it. By Autumn 1960 he moved to London and started teaching at Camberwell School of Art where his fellow teachers were Frank Auerbach (b.1931) and R.B.Kitaj (1932-2007). He also pursued a successful career as an artist spanning over fifty years and exhibited extensively in commercial and public galleries in London and around the country. Most of his abstract works were painted in the English countryside depicting clouds, sky and woodland in different seasons through the use of blue and dark blue colours constructed into blocks recreating a convincing sense of the physical landscape.
John travelled to Morocco and Greek islands which brought some darker colours into his palette. Hubbard was commissioned to make design sets and costumes for Le Baiser de la Fee by the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam in 1968 and for Richard Alson’s Midsummer and Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia by Royal Ballet, Covent Garden in London in 1983 and 1985 respectively. In 1990s John worked for the Welsh Arts Council and successfully tried himself as a garden designer. He was invited to design tapestries by Jacob Rothschild, Sir Timothy Sainsbury and Said Business School of the University of Oxford in the 2000s.
John Hubbard had his major retrospectives in the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1985 and the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut in 1986. He won the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1996. His works are represented in the major public collections including Tate, British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Government Art Collection and Arts Council of Great Britain in London, Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK and at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Yale Centre of British Art in the USA, National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada, National Gallery of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur and others internationally.
