About

The Power of Place…

Simon Johns is a British Architectural Painter and urban documentarian who seeks to shine a light on the hidden histories that lay concealed within our great cities.

He identifies fragments of the built environment that tell a story and immortalises them on canvas in astonishing detail, freezing them in time and transporting them out of their urban context. His paintings vividly capture the unexpected beauty that can be found in the ordinary things we see each day and inspire us to look at our city’s buildings in a new way.

“It was my love of old cities that brought me back to painting. Not their great monuments or grand buildings, but the myriad ordinary and oft ignored stories that exist all around us. These bitesize tales tell us about who we are and how we got here, they provide us with a connection to the past and in so doing afford more sucker to the soul than their mundanity would suggest. It is, in my view, these moments that create the spirit of a place, that define its genus loci and make it real, and it is these moments that I wish to record and celebrate”.

– Simon Johns