John studied at Canterbury College of Art and Chelsea School of Art where he graduated with large-scale images about his family’s relationship with football and, in particular, Millwall Football Club.
Much of what drives John and motivates his image-making stems from his experience as working class, and his early work deals with images documenting the environments in which he had grown up. His work was selected for the John Moores Exhibition in Liverpool (1999), and he has made work in dialogue with the museum collections in Dover and Faversham.
John’s practice has evolved from a hyper-realist painting style into working with film and video, book art, animation and illustration. He has been artist in residence in a working boatyard, where he produced an interactive installation; has had a solo show, Nothing Much, at Gainsbourough’s House Gallery in Sudbury; exhibited at the South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell, and has been in group shows at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and elsewhere and, in 2026, at the Kalkman Gallery, Maastricht. He was Artist in Residence at Room, an Arts Council project aimed at raising the profile of the arts in north Kent, and has organised the multi-disciplinary events, Fludde and Sham Fever.
John has made a number of short films and animation investigating the patrician and deadly treatment of working-class soldiers at the hands of complacent leaders. In 2018, John was commissioned to produce a piece responding to the Fleur-de-Lise collection in Faversham which resulted in an animated installation in the window of the Museum detailing the treatment of workers during the war at the site of The Gunpowder Works outside Faversham.