John Boydell Rogers is English and was born in Leigh Lancashire in 1934.  He entered university in 1956 after serving in the Royal Air Force during his National Service.  He has been painting and teaching since then, finally retiring from teaching at Goldsmiths' College, University of London in 1987.

Prior to moving to France permanently in 1998, he was selected for the London Group's Biennial Exhibition at The Barbican Gallery and the Hunting Art Prize Exhibition in 1995.  Previously he had been a prize winner in Welsh National Exhibitions, for which he was selected by Elizabeth Frink, Alan Jones and George Melly.  Earlier Exhibitions included the Arnofini Gallery Bristol, Royal West of England Academy, The Mappin Gallery Shefffield and St David's Hall, Cardiff.

John's passion for sailing and flying has been a major influence on his art.  He holds British Private pilot and International glider pilot licences.

"When flying or sailing, I am experiencing something about rising and falling air, about ebbing and flooding tides and about the form of the planet.  From 5,000 metres in the near silence of a glider, the detritus of mankind desappears from view and the world's beauty is breathtaking.

I believe these things are 're-presented' in my paintings, together with a whole rag-bag of personal history.  I also hope they retain enough embiguity to allow the viewer to enter the paintings in their own terms alongside mine.  The paintings are an amalgamation of found and partly formed images, a very old and familiar process for artists.  When painting and drawing we are following the same activity as our ancestors in teh CHauvet cave and beyond.  For me these processes are of discovering, revealing, obscuring and correcting, they leave a tidemark, a spiritual fossil of what has taken place in the making.  In many cases they include fragments and debris of the studio.

I recognise the metaphor of super novae providing stardust for the seeds of new life."

All drawings and paintings are abstracts they exist as two dimensional objects.  They are the products of their makers'own concept of reality which in turn has been influenced by all that has gone before.

The invention fo photography introduced a shift in huan visual perception and the recording of that perception.  Most certainly this does not make painting and drawing obsolete, in muy opinion it enhances its status.

John Boydell Rogers

2019