Big Issue vendor John Williams is an artist. Pencil drawings mostly; often still lifes worked up from photographs, though he’ll have a go at chalks and charcoal too. He’s been at it since school, where he came out with a good grade in O Level art, and he comes back to it whenever life lets him.
“It takes my mind off the worries of normal living,” he says. “It settles my head down, which these days is a good thing.”
John sells the magazine outside the Co-op in Killay, Swansea, where he’s been for five years. Before that he was in Weston-super-Mare. All told, he’s been a vendor for around 17 years. Drawing has been the constant. He sits at home with a coffee and music in the background, working from a photograph. He’s stubborn about portraits, which don’t always come off, but in still life he can lose hours.
Struggling to see
John has worn glasses for more than 20 years, but keeping them up to date had become more and more of a problem. Eye tests he could just about manage. The glasses afterwards were a different matter.
“I’d still be using old glasses that were four years out of date,” he says, “because I could afford the eye test, but not the glasses.”
The cost of being unable to see properly added up in other ways: blurred vision, eyes that ached, headaches that wouldn’t shift.
