Biography
John Slavin was born in an industrial region of Scotland in 1956 and received a very academic training at Edinburgh college of Art 1975-1980.
His teacher was Dame Elizabeth Blackadder (Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland). For twenty years he lived and painted landscape on the Isle of Skye in the extreme north-west of Scotland, concentrating on the rocks which lie in tidal water and the dramatic mountains.
He has drawn and painted all his life and he is a serious student of drawing and painting. He has exhibited and sold in Scotland and England: at Visual Arts Scotland, The Royal Scottish Academy, Sutton Gallery Edinburgh, Doubtfire Gallery Edinburgh, Glasgow Art Fair and Durham University. Totally he has held five solo exhibitions.
In recent years he has gradually exchanged North for South. Now his painting is rooted in the mountains of Andorra. On long climbs he makes pencil drawings on paper to be worked up in the studio using acrylic on canvas.
John Slavin’s direct speech: “From Andorra the eye can see beyond. It is a great advantage to have altitude and vista. Drawing is absolutely important to painting which is a distillation of drawing. In transferring information from pencil to paint there is an expansion. Painting is yin but perception is yang. In painting I test my drawing of the mountain; all its hypothetical supposition of what is to be in the painting. I attempt to integrate its information, already made, with the painting, yet to be made . . .
‘In painting the degree of abstraction always depends upon the degree of representation, and vice versa.’ (Salvador Dali)
I attempt to create images of beauty . . .
‘Don’t be afraid of perfection. You will never attain it.’ (Salvador Dali)
My paintings come from experience of the mountain. In my inner voyage of painting I use . . .
‘Images, reveries, memories, memories of dreams, memories of visions, dreams of hallucination, refractions of refractions of refractions of that original Alpha and Omega of experience’ . . . (R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience)
My paintings come from imagination . . .
‘The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM . . .’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
And my paintings come from Andorra, where the magnitude of her beauty is my intimate guide.”
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Direct contacts of John Slavin: tel.: +44 7789543100, email: [email protected] (Please place in subject – John Slavin paintings)
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Look here for more of modern art of Andorra online
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