Art

It was at Mendips that the apprenticeship of his creativity was to be found in the self-defence mechanism of isolation, of story writing, books and poetry. All were to nurture a personal declaration of his art, and later, the studio was to provide a platform for others to support his genius. In many ways, John Lennon falls into history’s category of the tortured artist. As he himself declared:

All art is pain expressing itself. I think all life is, everything we do, but particularly artists – that's why they're always vilified. They’re always persecuted because they show pain, they can't help it. They express it in art and the way they live, and people don't like to see that reality that they're suffering.{1}

As a musician and artist he displayed a fierce independence and marched to the beat of his own drum, but at the same time he was dogged by insecurity, pessimism and depression. For all his musical and artistic success, John was forever haunted by fears, living most of his life shadowed by doubt. On meeting John, Stuart Sutcliffe’s sister Pauline was to comment that ‘John’s whole history speaks to a desperate kind of nurturing’.{2}