John O’Sullivan visits artist John Jobson at his home on the Little Sugar Loaf in County Wicklow
Born in 1941, John Jobson has been an artist since his early twenties, when he dodged a career in the Irish Guards by deliberately failing the exams for which his father, to ensure success, sent him to a crammer. A sympathetic teacher at that school spotted his artistic talent and advised him to follow his star. His earlier education, at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen (the Alma Mater of Samuel Beckett), had encouraged his interest in art by moving him into an A-level class two years ahead of his peers. He recalls ‘the extremely good art masters’ there, especially a Mr Tovey. It was outside the art room at Portora, aged fourteen, that Jobson had the epiphany that determined his future. The revelation came to him: ‘there’s one thing I can control in life and that’s what I put inside a frame’. That, he says, is when he decided to be an artist. His subsequent formal art education was sketchy. Having thwarted his father’s military ambitions for him, he went farming at the age of eighteen, working as a stockman in Kill, Co Kildare. It was during this period that he ‘got seriously into horses’. He began breaking horses for the renowned Taaffe family and eventually trained a few himself. While all this working on the land was taking place, he continued to make art and spent a couple of terms at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. He learned little there, however, and suffered some discouraging encounters with the autocratic Seán Keating, who had a tendency to insert his own marks into students’ works in progress. ‘Keating was the most dreadful drawing master,’ says Jobson. ‘No feeling for line.’
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