John Clinton
John Clinton has been sculpting in one medium or another all of his life.
Born in Vancouver in 1956, like many kids John Clinton went to Saturday morning art school, book art in both elementary and high school and had a crummy art teacher in grade 10 who told him that his work wasn’t serious enough. Despite the teacher’s remark, by late high school John Clinton was heavily into wood carving, doing figurative studies, cityscapes and reliefs. His first commission was for Purdy’s Chocolates where he carved a candy mould of a turn-of-the-century steam engine.
John Clinton began university at UBC and later transferred to Queen’s. While at Queen’s he began carving cityscapes in earnest. His work was exhibited in local galleries in Kingston including the Agnes Eatherington Art Gallery.
In 1978 John Clinton moved to Toronto and began what has become a life-long career in advertising. Advertising took him to Chicago and New York, but through it all he never stopped sculpting. Wood carving gave way to papier mâché, where he developed his love of sculpting the everyday characters who came into his life. Because papier mâché was so quick and portable it freed him up to be more whimsical in his creations and to experiment with colour. In the early 1980’s John Clinton began taking sculpting classes at Central Tech in Toronto. While he started out working in cement and stone, John Clinton quickly graduated to bronze, his true love. In this wonderful medium he has discovered the unique qualities which allow him to combine the permanence of bronze with the whimsy and colour of papier mâché and the warmth and softness of wood.
John Clinton’s work has been exhibited in galleries in Kingston, Vancouver, Toronto and Chicago, and his sculptures can be seen in both corporate and private collections in Canada and the United States.