John Hancock

Having spent 34 years as an illustrator and portrait painter, specializing in figurative watercolors for book covers and magazine stories, I am now a full time landscape painter.

I spent much of this time living in Brighton on the south coast of England , however I decided I needed a little more space and a quieter time and 5 years ago I moved to a remote village in the Balkan mountains of central Bulgaria. It has been here that my love of trees and landscape painting has come together to produce the recent work here on this website.

The “forestscapes” are my latest paintings. These are large involved works - all inspired by the woods that surrounds our house here in the mountains. It is usually in the fall , when the colors change, that I find myself most inspired. It is the time to gather as much reference for new canvasses which generally get completed during the winter months when the snow arrives and we hunker down.
Please note that I now prefer to send all my paintings in a tube. This is so much safer for the painting. It means the rolled up canvas will need to be taken to a framers for re-stretching. This is a straightforward process , not very expensive and the painting can be framed at the same time.

I was born in Plymouth , Devon, raised in Sussex and studied for my degree in Visual Communication at Brighton Art College.