John Lansdown

John A B Lansdown was born in 1964 in North England. His formative years in the Lakelands of North West England made him an outside landscape painter which is his prime occupation. Watercolours, sketches and oil paintings interweave his poems and haikus. After an economics degree in Scotland and clerical work in England, Lansdown studied violin making at the famous Newark School of Violin Making in Newark, Nottinghamshire. The violin-making course left him with a discipline to make things of fine quality.

A recurring dream of a rural country rich in folk culture with short cold winters and a long sweltering summer enticed him to visit Bulgaria with his girlfriend. After tasting Mavrud wine, seeing donkeys pulling carts, mountain monasteries, and ancient Thracian tombs, it was difficult to leave. He realized he had a subliminal connection with Bulgaria upon seeing oil paintings by the Bulgarian masters who record the rural past of Bulgaria. It is possible for a modern urban dweller to understand the discipline of rural life, how villagers had a blueprint system for every simple task, from these paintings. Slatyu Boyadjiv for example, paints the meticulous spiral arrangement of hay on the snowy ground to feed cows in winter. Though only a makeshift temporary project, such a motif rivals the design precision of a Zen garden.

Lansdown has lived in a village near the art city of Plovdiv in Bulgaria since 2006, and joined the Plovdiv Artists Union. He has attended a number of art symposiums in Bulgaria as well as the 2009 Atelier an der Donau symposium in Pöchlarn, Austria that honours Oskar Kokoschka who was born there. Selling artwork internationally, he has exhibited in Bulgaria, Austria, France and England. It is possible to see his artwork at www.lansdownart.wordpress.com