Lantic Gallery has been privileged to exhibit the work of John Maltby from 2004 until his passing in 2020 aged 84. John was a prolific maker whose work was inspired by English landscape, the sea, architecture and music. His work is represented in both public and private collections worldwide, including The Victoria & Albert Museum - London, The Museum Für Kunstegewerbe - Hamburg and The Royal Scottish Museum- Edinburgh. He was a Fellow of the Craft Potters Association and is recognised today as one of Britain’s finest ceramic artists.

John Maltby’s distinctive style is loved and appreciated by many who favour a different take on life. His strong themes are mostly figurative, taken from ancient cultures and historical figures, myths and legends, but informed by modern society and current affairs. The use of symbolic animals and creatures can be interpreted as statements of the artist’s view of the world in which we live now, but the interpretation is left entirely to the viewer.

John Maltby was born in Lincolnshire in 1936 and studied sculpture at Leicester and at Goldsmith's College, London. John went on to teach painting for two and a half years before working with David Leach at Bovey Tracey, whose imagination and philosophy made a profound impression. In 1964 John set up his own workshop in Devon. Having trained with Leach in the Anglo-Oriental tradition he realized on reflection that he had little identification and interest with the great ceramic traditions of China, Japan and the East and was more familiar and excited by Western Artists - Picasso, Klee, Moore & Nicholson and the primitive Wallis. His work went through several distinct stylistic periods taking him away from functional pots towards the making of more individual sculptural pieces.