John Cornall has at various times been a poet, critic, editor, collector, educator but at all times he has been a champion of the decorative and life-affirming.

In the 1990s he was an critic regularly reviewing and writing essays on art for newspapers and specialist journals. Around 1993 he made the first of many visits to the ex-Eastern Bloc where he became fascinated by the authentic culture he found there “amongst the wreckage of the old forgotten peasant half of Europe”. He began making friends and contacts and collecting folk art, glass icons and rustic artefacts, “quality things that are largely unrecorded other than in obscure Soviet coffee table books with cardboard covers”. The spirit and vitality of the old peasant art was a sharp contrast to the commercialism of the 90s contemporary art scene and he soon found himself exploring the rural bywaters of Europe rather than railing at the status quo on Cork St.