Painter and composer John Townsend was born in England but has lived in France for most of his life. Following a multi-national and eclectic career as a musician, a human resource director and founder of his own train-the-trainer institute near Geneva, John has been painting and exhibiting internationally for over 20 years.

He and his wife Fiona, who is Scottish and spent all of her childhood holidays on Arran, are presently based in Brittany but have recently purchased a home in Whiting Bay so as to be closer to Fiona’s family on the mainland with a view to moving here permanently.

John paints acrylic-based seascapes, peaceful horizons and places of quiet solitude.
His colours are deep indigos and light-filled blues and whites; his canvasses, with a rough, tactile finish evoke the gables of the solid crofts of Celtic shorelines.
As an inquisitive traveller John has always been drawn to the wild empty spaces at the ends of the earth where he has tried in both his music and his painting to capture the atmosphere of their lonely poetry, to seize a moment where the light changes or a wave surges and breaks.
He is almost exclusively inspired by all those peaceful places where we can get away from busy-ness, by the light falling on the sea and by unreachable  horizons which seem to melt into the sky.