The Painter of Prospect Park

John Lloyd, a 56-year-old freelance graphic designer and Windsor Terrace resident, has been painting for 40 years.

He spends his time in painting landscapes and representations of the park’s buildings and architecture. He stands at his easel and spreads acrylic paint over a canvas while listening to music playing from his iPod, which is plugged into a portable speaker and fixed above his canvas, as his wife Jane Talcott, who he has known for nearly 20, paints at a separate easel not too far away. 

For the past six years, John Lloyd and Jane Talcott have set up their mobile studio in various spots among the park’s 585 acres and paint on the weekends—to escape the confines and monotony of their modern day offices.

"We come out here to balance our lives from working in front of the computer, everyday," Lloyd said while finishing a “vaguely impressionistic” painting of the Prospect Park Boathouse on the lake on Sunday. “It’s a place to find distance and perspective and to remember a three-dimensional world around me.” 

Lloyd and Talcott’s work is currently being exhibited at The TAI Group (The Actors Institute) in Manhattan and will be on exhibit at in Windsor Terrace starting this Friday, March 30, for a month.

He says painting outside is a necessity because he spends most of his time at work staring at the computer screen “five inches in front” of his face. He said working in that condition makes him feel like he is living in a two-dimensional world and it is important to live and experience all the dimensions.

But there is another aspect to being outside and that is to experience the most populated borough of the city—Brooklyn, where he has lived for the past 30 years.

“There is something extraordinary happening in Brooklyn that we want to be a part of,” the painter said while he added different color greys to the canvas and Louie Armstrong’s “Who’s it” played softly. “It’s a mixture of all communities with tremendous creativity and businesses of all kinds.”

Lloyd, who has lived in Windsor Terrace for the past five years and Park Slope before that for 25, said that DUMBO is becoming a mini east coast version of Silicon Valley, with all the new social media and internet companies taking root, like Meetup and Etsy. 

“Thirty years ago Brooklyn seemed like a forgotten borough, it was quiet,” Lloyd said as parkgoers eased by, a man with a fishing pole, a couple pushing a stroller with a baby slumbering and a man played the saxophone a couple paces away at the mouth of a tunnel. “But now it’s the archetypal character of a certain kind of human experience, it’s the center of the world.”

He explained that a lot of Americans have a connection to Brooklyn and according to a certain poll, “one out of every five people has a relative who lived in Brooklyn at one time.” He also said that Bugs Bunny’s original voice was in fact a Brooklyn accent.

“Brooklyn is almost a brand all in itself,” he said. 

And practicing his passion in Prospect Park with his wife allows him to see the borough in action.

“Painting means you can just sit here and watch it all happening,” Lloyd said as Aphex Twin came on his iPod.

One of the most memorable Brooklyn happenings he witnessed in the park was a musical duet between a man paying the saxophone and a bullfrog near the lake. 

“The man was playing and the bullfrog was answering back,” he said. “A duet between a man and bullfrog, you can’t make this stuff up.”