John K. Lawson was born in Birmingham, England, in 1962 and raised mostly in the countryside until his family moved to South London when he was a young teenager. Lawson always knew from a very early age that he had the need to create. In Working Class England the word artist was never really in the vocabulary. Friends and family started calling him that long before he considered himself one. He first came to America on a student exchange program in engineering at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There his artistic abilities were encouraged, and he returned to England two years later to concentrate on landscape painting. Eventually, Lawson was drawn back to the Deep South, and soon became part of an underground art culture in New Orleans that included working in tattoo, T-shirt and mural designs long before these mediums became mainstream. Lawson also became known for his unique drawing style and creations using discarded Mardi Gras beads. He covered mannequins, pianos, and drums with intricate beadwork, including a fifty-three-foot- long bar top at the notorious artists’ haven, the Audubon Hotel. The Audubon project was especially personal as this hotel, populated with a cast of crazy Cajun characters, set the scene for his top selling novel: Hurricane Hotel. The book recounts a rollicking street car ride into the underbelly of New Orleans and was started many moons ago while living in a small dive hotel on St Charles Avenue in New Orleans.
New York City, NY; NYC