Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Prints and Printmaking, 1 February – 30 April 2011;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Skyscapes, 10 May – 22 June 2014;
Lymington, St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Shorelines: Artists on the South Coast, 19 September 2015 – 9 January 2016;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Road to Abstraction, 21 May – 24 July 2016;
Woking, Coroners Court, 3 May 2017 – 30 July 2019;
Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, Reflection: British Art in an Age of Change, 17 August 2019 – 5 January 2020
Literature:
Ruth Artmonsky, The School Prints: A Romantic Project, London, 2010 (p. 76), 2nd Series (no. 18);
S. Martin, John Tunnard, 2011 (no. 27. p. 66)
John Tunnard trained as a designer at the Royal College of Art (1919-21). In the twenties he worked for a number of textile companies; in the thirties he moved to Cornwall and started a hand-blocked silk business with his wife. He taught design at Penzance School of Art (1948-65).
Holiday is perhaps the most abstract of the School Prints. Herbert Read considered Tunnard a Surrealist at heart. Elements of Tunnard’s work have been linked to the stylisation necessary for textile design, but Read saw Tunnard more influenced by his love for, and knowledge of, nature. “A painting by John Tunnard begins in the order of nature; it traverses the phantasms of the imagination; and then it ends in the order of art, which is an analogy of the mystical mathematics of the City of Heaven.”
