Biography
John Chambers grew up in West Cornwall and after leaving grammar school studied at Penzance School of Art and at Redruth School of Art (1951 - 53) before going on to the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London (1954 - 57). After initially working for Shell he joined the art department at Peckham Comprehensive ((1957 - 58), returning to Cornwall to teach art at Fowey (1958 - 67). He moved to Basingstoke to become Head of Art at Queen Mary's School, a boys' grammar school, before joining South Devon College of Art, Newton Abbot in 1970, the art school subequently relocating to new art premises on the South Devon College site in Torquay (1970 - 95). He eventually retired as Head of the School of Art and Design and shortly afterwards returned to live in Penwith where he has continued to paint.
During secondment to Leeds College of Art (1964 - 65) he obtained a further Post Diploma in Fine Art and later an MA in Fine Art from Exeter Collect of Art. He has had a large retropective exhibition at the City of Lancaster Storey Gallery (1998); exhibited in a show of MA graduates at the Fishwick Gallery, Exeter College of Art (1994); had a series of solo exhibitions at the Bakehouse Gallery, Penzance (2000); the Gull Gallery, St. Ives; the INDO Art Bar in Whitechapel (2001); the Sultan Gallery, Lancaster (2004 and 2005); joint exhibitions at the St. Ives Arts Club with the St. Ives constructivist sculptor Gordon Allen (2006); with Gordon Allen and John Berryman (2007); the PZAG International Fine Art gallery, New Street, Penzance (2008); Trinity Centre, Newlyn (2009).
John Chambers has written on a range of art related topics: 'The Auckland Bramley' (1999), an account of a little known and critically neglected painting by Frank Bramley, a founder member of the Newlyn School, that hangs in the Auckland City Art Gallery, New zealand and 'Styr a Le' ('A sense of place'), a memoir of his time as a full time art student at the Penzance School of Art. He has written on the current state of the Cornish language movement as pursuing his interest in marxist aesthetics.
Since moving back to West Cornwall, he has consistently employed an experimental modernist methodology using a range of commercial, non-fine art materials. His compositions frequently employ a basic grid in which the position of the vertical and horizontal elements are arrived at through the use of proportions derived either using the 'Golden Section' or 'Fibonacci' sequences. From an essentially simple beginning the compositions increase in complexity, though always retaining a thematically linked relationship. Each project consists of some six to eight paintings, the individual pieces of work being seen as variations on the same visual theme. By the end of each project the basis for the next group of paintings has been suggested, a method that means that though he is always prepared to incorporate ways forward suggested by the materials, etc., in general his work can be seen as a linked number of stages within a pictorial chain, each project exhibiting elements of a visual family relationshipo and sense of pictorial unity.
John Chambers has consistently maintained an aesthetic commitment to a modernist, constructivist framework, while his use of Cornish titles reflects his involvement in the Cornish language movement and in other more politically based activities. At the present he is involved in the planning and production of a large scale project, 'An Whethel a Gernow' - 'The Story of Cornwall', a series of 8' by 4' abstract panels that incorporate visual elements taken from his work over the past five or six years.
In 1957 he married Hilary Carne, a local girl he met shortly before he started at the Slade, an extremely happy partnership that produced two sons and a daughter and lasted for over 30 years until Hilary's tragic death from cancer. In 1990 he married Jennifer Davidson and they live together in a quiet rural area halfway between Penzance and Helston. Growing up in a socialist family also undoubtedly influenced his poitical outlook and he was to become increasingly involved in the trade union and labour movement.
July 2010