John Bainbridge Copnall (1928–2007) was an English artist best known for his abstract expressionist painting of richly coloured stylised realism, often on a grand scale.
This proved a poor choice of a career as Copnall lacked the required mathematical ability and used the excuse of his National Service to leave architecture permanently in order to become a professional artist.
His work of this period displayed the influence of American abstract expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Morris Louis and Mark Rothko with Copnall using acrylic paint on cotton duck using increasingly larger canvasses.
By 1982, he was working in an artists' colony in the East End of London at the defunct Spratt's dog biscuit warehouse in Bow[9] whilst continuing with his teaching role.
In 1996, his solo show Reflections, Orbits and Radiances[13] in the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex drew mainly on work done in the period 1992-96.
In the catalogue, Christopher Lloyd, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures,[14] considered that it was "difficult to think of a more appropriate setting for John Copnall's paintings" than this light-filled example of pioneering mid-1930s architecture.