My buddy John Hyatt, who has died aged 65 after a protracted sickness, was an artist, musician and educator.
John taught for a few years at Manchester Metropolitan College, initially as head of positive artwork, from 1991, earlier than being appointed professor in 1994. Whereas there, he arrange Miriad (Manchester Institute for Analysis and Innovation in Artwork and Design), since dissolved attributable to restructuring.
Throughout his time there he lived in Rossendale, close to Manchester. In 2016, he moved to Liverpool to work at Liverpool John Moores College, the place he was professor of latest artwork within the college of artwork and design, establishing Artwork-Labs (creative analysis and applied sciences laboratories) in 2019. He was nonetheless working at LJMU on the time of his loss of life.
Inside and out of doors establishments, John regularly sought to transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries. He appreciated to create educational environments that allowed for exploration and freedom, continuously encouraging collaboration amongst his college students.
He had a parallel musical profession, notably because the lead singer and songwriter of the Three Johns, a post-punk band with a fanbase that expanded via common John Peel classes, a number of albums, nationwide and worldwide excursions, and miners’ strike profit gigs.
John’s artwork spanned the political and the fantastical, threaded via with eccentric humour, generally manifest in alter egos such because the aristocratic Sir Stuart Farquar RA or the ghostly Seymour Clearly. His first solo exhibition was Artwork Wars at Rochdale Artwork Gallery in 1984, and he went on to exhibit and curate in prestigious venues throughout the UK and world wide. It’s typical of his strategy to artmaking that his closing exhibition was at Wirral College instructing hospital, the place he was being handled.
John grew up in a suburb of Wolverhampton within the West Midlands, the one little one of Mary (nee Windrim), a faculty prepare dinner and Ron, a lorry driver. He excelled at Wolverhampton grammar college and went on to check positive artwork at Leeds College, graduating in 1981. Instructing work started nearly instantly, initially at Rochdale School of Artwork, and in 1988 the award of the Henry Moore printmaking fellowship at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett College) opened up new alternatives.
At all times mischievous and by no means in need of wit and knowledge, his optimism, inventive power and generosity knew no bounds. He needed higher lives for all and labored in the direction of that as trainer, artist, researcher, author, musician, or any of the labels we would use however which he at all times refused to be restricted by. Over the previous two years, he had suffered with recurrent head and neck most cancers.
In 1983 he met Liz Rodgers within the Faversham pub in Leeds, they usually married three years later. She and their youngsters, Tom and Elizabeth, survive him.
