Sculptor

John Jebb

John Jebb is a sculptor based in Ashton Keynes, near Cirencester, UK.

At age twelve, and as a result of his father’s death, John attended Wellington College in Berkshire, where he spent many hours in the art department fulfilling a burgeoning passion for visual art.  After leaving, he attended the Central School of Art, London, followed by a brief attendance at Birmingham School of Art.

John says “I found myself floundering without direction or learning any skills in Art Schools that had discarded traditional training in the arts upheavals of the sixties.  I walked out and taught myself to carve stone.”

In 1972 John went to California. After a couple of rewarding years in Porterville, he was awarded a scholarship to study for a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Video at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

After completing his MFA, he was offered a job at the Long Beach Museum of Art.  His work, as well as running the video facility, included successfully raising funds through the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council to provide expansion of the Video Art Program and its archive (now incorporated into the Getty Museum Collection in LA).

John left Long Beach and set up a large studio in LA with his friend the sculptor Masayuki Oda.  This provided him the ideal situation to make more sculpture.  He had his first Solo Exhibition in Los Angeles, 1984, and as a result of some sales he decided to  “go to Cararra, Italy, and buy tons of marble!”

Throughout the next thirty years he created work in his studio, taught Art in some Colleges and Universities in California and occasionally worked with mannequin companies in LA and Hollywood special effects television and film productions. He regularly exhibited in solo and group shows in California and across the USA and also accepted private commissions.

In 1997 he set up a studio in Portland, Dorset – and worked bi-continentally for a decade. This led to a permanent move back to the UK, in 2008.

John says, “I have now come full circle back to my roots in England.”

For more information, and to see examples of John’s work, visit his website, at www.johnjebb.com.

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