"There is no beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion"
With a focus on the female form, in all its varying forms of abstraction, Johns uses his firmly adopted style of bold outlines and strong contrasts of colour to capture the complexity of the human shape. The collection also features his excursions into landscape and townscape scenes which he accomplishes with satisfying ease.
Ewart Johns was a painter, born in Barry, South Wales in 1923. Johns exhibited widely throughout the UK and was represented in the WAC collection. He later combined a University lecturing career with work as a freelance artist. His academic research, chiefly at Exeter, was in Urban Design and led to a number of publications including a book on British Townscape for Edward Arnold. The combination of his interest in the practice of art with the study of design led to his appointment as the first Head of the Department of Visual Arts at Lancaster University.
His solo and group exhibitions include a show at the Victoria Gallery in 1974, and at the Metropole Art Collection, Folkestone in 1980. His group venues include shows at the Leicester Galleries, St. Ives, Plymouth, Exeter, Bristol, Lancaster University Art Gallery, Cardiff and New Hampshire, USA. Blindness in later years curtailed his painting and he turned to woodworking and collage, alongside white line drawings. A retrospective of his life's work was held in 2007 at Cube 3 Gallery in Plymouth.
