Byland Abbey in the moonlight

'There is no more revealing human personality than the visual artist... for a man will paint only of himself and of the things he knows, loves, hates, desires.' John Minton is a descriptive artist in the best sense in that his drawings and paintings transmute into visual terms what he saw and felt in front of people and places. The tension often found in his paintings, with their romantic imagery and taut severities of style, parallels the conflict in his nature between his anarchic bohemianism and his simultaneous need to belong. (F. Spalding, John Minton: dance till the stars come down, Aldershot, 2005, p.3.)