74 By the Dart • John Donaldson


overnight!” John learnt the Hammond organ straight away. He lost his waistcoats and side parting and started indulging in the late night bar scene, spending weekdays in the office and evenings playing in various jazz and soul clubs around Chichester and Brighton with his wife Sandi. In 1975 he, Sandi and daughter Anna got the chance to move down to Devon. “We came down to visit Sandi’s relatives. One day we wandered up Kingsbridge High Street and saw a cottage for sale in Blackawton. We had a look around and immediately put an offer in.” When John arrived in Devon he decid-


in London and visit fabulous restaurants. You could quickly spot the difference between the income of an artist and that of a West End gallery owner though – his drive littered with top end cars and our rusting campervan tucked between them!” It was in 1988 that John became a member of the


ed to pack up his design job and finally give in to his first love – art. He admits becoming a working artist was very hard at first: “There wasn’t a lot of money to be had. I remember standing outside a Kingsbridge gallery plucking up the courage to go in. I asked the owner to buy some of my work, and he actually said yes! He regularly sold paintings to America and was in need of small pictures of local landscapes – “I’d do one-a-day and sell it for £8.” John’s confidence and skills improved and he soon managed to get his work into other places including a gallery in Mayfair. He recalls how he would meet the owner in various service stations between Devon and London, where he would hand over the paintings in the car park in exchanges that could have been mistaken for illicit deals! “Looking back it was all very informal and ad hoc, but it worked! I had about 20 exhibitions with him over 25 years. We became good friends and we would regularly stay with his family


“There was great camaraderie and mutual respect.


We had a brilliant time.”


‘Dartmouth Five’ group of artists. Simon Drew, Paul Riley, John Gillo and Andras Kaldor were already a happy foursome putting on events and exhibitions in Dartmouth and beyond. John had been invited before to join their gang but he says he wasn’t keen: “I was concerned there would be much earnest talk on such things as the relative merits of abstraction and post modernism.” Then one night Kaldor’s wife Sally rang John during one of their meetings and explained that the gang mainly drink and sometimes even eat together! “I was up for that,” John says


with a cheery grin. “Sally was very persuasive and I quickly realised it wasn’t just a boys’ club. I was very pleased to be involved, as being an artist is a bit of a solitary business. There was great camaraderie and mutual respect. We had a brilliant time.” They used to put on stunts to promote exhibitions. John played a piano suspended from a ceiling in Hampshire and they once did land- based synchronised swimming behind a blue cloth, wearing bathing hats, trunks and clothes pegs on their noses. The quintet used to go on painting


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