Over the past few years John has developed a range of core and elective courses in Art. Recently he has developed (and now course organises) Art in Practice 2 which is part of the BA (Fine Art) Programme. This large cohort course involves students working through a range of projects with different technical and conceptual strategies of research, making and presenting. 

John has also developed the elective, Adventures in Drawing, which uses fast projects to introduce students to ways of approaching drawing and artwork in general. This successful course continues to evolve and the aim is to expand it into other courses and events. 
John also teaches Fine Art Printmaking which emphasises the function of the multiple as a way to develop and present ideas and The Model; Making and Meaning, which introduces students to methods of fabrication and the miniature.

At the core of John's work there is an ongoing obsession with drawing, painting, making and the heartbreaking amount of imagery and stuff that the world contains at this point in history. His work aims to find ways of collecting and organising groups of visual material into large scale multi-part installations that can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional or a combination of the two.

Recent projects include a permanent site-specific series of paintings at the new Edinburgh Haematology Centre. These images, under the title ‘Living in the Trees’ (2022) depict invented tree-house structures with the aim to form an area of escapism for the staff working there.  

Over the past few years John has developed ways to show large-scale painting-based works in unconventional ways. Mixed Nuts (2019) which was installed at Govan Project Space, Glasgow, brought over 1600 individual works together as a floor-based painting which was expanded into a new work called ‘Part of the Observable Universe’, which was included in the large survey show ‘Frontiers; Painting in Scotland Now’ at the Royal Scottish Academy (2024).

John has also has explored the idea of the ‘Unrealised Project’ (2019-) as a way of investigating large-scale or potentially impossible undertakings through small-scale proposal drawings, paintings and models. 

Large groups of these works have formed the basis of an ongoing series of installations that have been shown in collaboration with the Edinburgh International Science Festival over the past 4 years. The works contained in these exhibitions aim to echo the energy of the festival and emphasise the importance of play within the generation of ideas.