John McKinnon

John has spent most of the past 40 years working in stone, bronze, steel, clay, concrete and mixed-media. John is known primarily as a sculptor, although he also expresses himself through other disciplines such as painting, printmaking, drawing and multi-media. Throughout his career he has endeavoured to play and experiment with whatever came his way. He feels that an idea that cannot be expressed with one media can be expressed well in another.



From time to time over the years he has worked in the commercial art business which has inspired some of his later artwork. In the past 12 years he has developed an interest in working in the ephemeral media of ice, snow and sand. The creation of these non-permanent works give him what he refers to as the Zen-Sculpting experience and have taken him to many exotic places around the world.



Teaching has been a great inspiration for John. In the early eighties he taught at David Thompson University in Nelson. From the mid eighties until now he has taught modern hard stone carving technique to Inuit carvers in many communities in the Canadian Arctic. During this period he also taught many courses in Sculpture at Fleming College’s Haliburton School of The Arts in Haliburton, Ontario.

John lives in Nelson, British Columbia.