John O’Driscoll

John is a local Sydney painter. Who captures your attention with his fresh and vibrant plein-air paintings.n After being spat out from a country boarding school into 1980s Sydney, he started uni studying history, soon he discovered Goya and Goya found him as he picked up brushes and started to paint.

John is a passionate painter who then moved into the Gunnery squat soon after its foundation. He co-ran the gallery they created, and began producing his first exhibitions of his paintings collaborating with other artists, musicians and performers in the mad theatres there. After 6 years the NSW government Ministries of Housing and the Arts found a way to throw them out, but not before they breathed life into the gunnery that still serves as artist studios to this day. Since then John has continued to make and exhibit paintings, drawings and prints in both Sydney and Melbourne, as well as up the NSW North Coast and its bush hinterland.

It was when John found himself in cramped living conditions, that he started going out to the street to paint a modern day plein-air painter (or do portrait sketches) because the light is better and he had more space to work, drawing and painting what he found in front of him. Most of the landscapes are painted in this manner. This exhibition includes a selection of paintings painted over the past five years before COVID to the present.