JOHN DUFFIN Thames West - from Hungerford Bridge, Acrylic on Paper, 10.5 x 60cm London Panorama - Greenwich Observatory Dusk, Oil, 30 x 100cm Thames East - from Hungerford Bridge, Acrylic on Paper, 10.5 x 60cm Front Cover: The Coach & Horses - Soho, Oil, 76 x 51cm John Duffin 2018 CATTO GALLERY 100 Heath Street • Hampstead • London NW3 1DP Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 6660 •
[email protected] 3 John Duffin arrived at my etching class at the Central School of Art in Bloomsbury in the 1980s. By that time he had already worked for four years as a ships draughtsman at the famous submarine shipyards of Barrow in Furness followed by a further four years at Goldsmiths College, a hotbed of enterprise and home to the emerging group known as the Y.B.A.s or young British Artists. Essentially a painter he had identified in himself a desire to etch. The desire to etch is, as an early tutor of mine, Julian Trevelyan RA, insisted, a kind of addiction. It takes one to know one, and over the centuries Durer, Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, Hockney and many, many others have embraced etching with a compulsive passion, reveling in its freedoms and parameters, as well as its poetic resonances. John Duffin is of that ilk, a true etching addict. A man with a limitless work ethic, John instinctively understood what etching could achieve that no other medium could. A voracious appetite for learning and enjoying hands on skills and influences, an engaging optimism coupled with enormous energy are fundamental to his being.