Dr W John Hewitt  

My creative practice switches between the media of drawing and etching, and its subject matter invariably deals with observed events, people, animals and locations. My artwork is in several national collections including the V&A, the Museum of London and the Government Art Collection. My illustration work has appeared in books, magazines and newspapers including the Sunday Times, the Radio Times, the Guardian, New Statesman and Time out. My drawings and prints have been published periodically in AMBIT, the journal of prose, poetry and pictures, since 1980.

I completed a PhD in 2008. The thesis title was TRUE STORIES DRAWN FROM THE LIFE: A CRITICAL AND CULTURAL REFLECTION ON COURTROOM DRAWINGS IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS. My research encompassed aspects of reportage drawing, various modes of print publishing, relationships between words, photographs and drawing, notions of authorship in the context of art practice and criticism, and the value of personal memory as an evidential tool in visual documentation. I have subsequently contributed articles to Varoom! magazine and Varoom!Lab on subjects arising from this research.

In 2005 the Righton Press published my remembered drawn and written account of the London bombings of July 7 2005 (Emblem Issue 2: There and Back, Righton Press, Manchester 2005).

In the late 1980s I toured as a sketch artist with the Pogues, co-illustrating Poguetry: The Lyrics of Shane MacGowan (Faber and Faber, London 1989) with the photographer Steve Pyke.

I am an 0.5 Senior Lecturer in Illustration with Animation at MMU. I have taught widely in English art schools since 1981, in the areas of fine art, printmaking and illustration at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and have acted as External Examiner on nine art and design courses since 1998. I was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 2003 and was elected to the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts in 2011.