John Thomas Burgess Balkwill, Jr.
John Thomas Burgess Balkwill, Jr., passed away suddenly on February 7, 2024, in Santa Barbara, California. He was 72. John was born in London, Ontario, Canada, to John and Betty (Howe) Balkwill. He emigrated with his family to Detroit, Michigan in 1956, and then moved to Greensburg, Indiana in 1958, where he spent most of his childhood and whose rural, small-town environment would play an important role in shaping John’s attitudes throughout his life. In 1967, John returned to Michigan with his family and graduated from Northville High School in 1970. He attended the University of Notre Dame, where his sophomore year studying at St. Mary’s College in Rome had a profound influence on his life’s direction. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, John moved briefly to Santa Barbara, where among other jobs he worked as the maitre’d at the Santa Barbara Inn.
After his brief stint in Santa Barbara, John returned to Michigan and took up residence in Ann Arbor, where he would live for nearly a decade, forming many life-long relationships and meeting his future wife, Nina “Kim” Kramer. During this period, John returned frequently to Italy, with Verona as his base of operations, learning to love all things Italian and making a living principally by importing gold jewelry and selling it to Detroit-area jewelers.
John’s first experience in the book arts was as a bookbinder in Ann Arbor, where he started as an investor in the Bessenberg Bindery with two colleagues in 1982. John’s work in the bindery sparked a deeper interest in the book arts, and ultimately led to his leaving Ann Arbor and pursuing an MFA degree from the University of Alabama’s Institute for the Book Arts in Tuscaloosa. While there, he studied letterpress printing and the art of fine bookmaking with the internationally recognized private press printer Gabriel Rummonds.
After obtaining his MFA, John worked with Harold Berliner’s Type foundry in Grass Valley, California, then helped Greg Peterson start up the Huckleberry Press in Incline Village, Nevada. John also taught book design and printing at the University of Nevada-Reno during this time, where he was the Associate Director of the Black Rock Press.
In 1996, John and Kim moved from Reno to Santa Barbara, where he set up his own business, the Lumino Press, dedicated to producing handprinted and bound limited edition books, prints and other quality materials. John designed and printed limited editions in collaboration with numerous well-known artists and authors including Pulitzer prize-winning writers Gary Snyder, Daniel J. Boorstin and James McPherson, and the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. He frequently collaborated on artists’ books and portfolios with Mary Heebner, Jacquelyn McBain, Mark Ryden, and Peter Goin among others, as well as with various galleries and collectors.
Mary Heebner was John’s close friend as well as collaborator. She reflected on their shared artistic pursuits: “Over 25 years, John printed 19 of my artists books, under the imprint Simplemente Maria Press”. He steered me away from the gutter of bad taste, advised me on type, design, and tradition. We laughed, kibitzed, shared tales of past adventures, belted out old 50s songs, snippets of Italian drinking songs, or arias, all the while working together to create discrete objects of beauty. John knew that letters deftly placed to become words, that could signify ideas, set on a page in a beautiful way mattered.”
Mary’s husband, Macduff Everton, added, “we both depended on him for his input, for the final say on any of our projects. We relied on him for his friendship and acumen. In book design, all the little suggestions that no one will ever see because they were so right, they don’t call attention to themselves, the whole reason for classic composition and design, to be so right that it simply, elegantly, works. When friends and family came to town, we always included John. He was more family than friend, a fine distinction indeed. He was curious, maybe one of the nicest traits one can hope for in another human being, along with kindness, generosity, and humor. He had all of those.”
Mary also shared the origin of the name of John’s Santa Barbara business, The Lumino Press: “He told me of the epiphanic moment that influenced him to pursue the printer’s art. One afternoon, he sought shelter from a storm under the coffered ceiling of the Pantheon in Rome, still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. The tempest subsided, and a ray of beatific sunlight beamed through the dome’s oculus, open to the heavens. He would name his press The Lumino.”
John was an accomplished print maker, having learned the techniques of wood engraving from John DePol, the dean of American wood engravers, and Japanese woodblock printmaking from Akira Kurosaki, one of the most respected contemporary Japanese printmakers. He also produced and exhibited photomontages, collages and watercolor paintings.
John’s graphic art and limited-edition books have been exhibited widely and acquired by numerous private and public collections. His work has been exhibited at the Book Club of California in San Francisco, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Occidental College and the Nevada Museum of Art. His graphic art is in the permanent collections of Stanford University, the Library of Congress, the University of Michigan, Brown University and the Book Club of California among many others.
John loved everything about Santa Barbara, and appreciated the opportunity his chosen profession there afforded him to cross paths with a diverse and accomplished group of individuals, many of whom would become his friends as well as clients.
While known mostly for his artistic talents, John was also widely admired as a world-class raconteur, a talent predicated both on his genuine interest in everyone he met and his near encyclopedic knowledge on a seemingly endless array of diverse subjects. John loved nothing more than an extended conversation – and debate – over a shared meal, a long walk, or an aimless drive into the countryside, often relishing the role of devil’s advocate on a controversial topic simply for the pleasure of prodding his friends into exasperation. John also was not bashful about exposing friends to his colorful vocabulary and had a limited tolerance for political correctness, often complaining that “nobody can take a joke anymore”.
John was a sports aficionado who enjoyed watching the occasional baseball, basketball or football game with his friend Macduff Everton, but whose real sporting love was playing tennis, a pastime he enjoyed with his oldest friend Gary Adkins on a near-weekly basis for decades on Santa Barbara’s public courts. He was also a competent, albeit reluctant, golfer.
Throughout his life, John remained true to his unpretentious roots, a trait readily observable in his favorite Santa Barbara dining and drinking venues, all of which were invariably “old school”: Arnoldi’s for Italian, the Tee Off or Jill’s Place for steak, Dargan’s for Irish fare, “mom and pop” diners for coffee and breakfast and the Sportsman Lounge or Joe’s Café for a cocktail. While John could be prodded into a meal or drink in the “Funk Zone”, it was seldom his venue of choice.
And John’s many sojourns with friends into the small towns of the Santa Ynez/Santa Maria wine country were not complete without a concerted (and usually futile) effort on his part to convince his traveling companions to stop either at Anderson’s for its “famous” pea soup, or some 1950s era Cantonese restaurant with half its neon lights missing and not a single car in the parking lot. He invariably would end those entreaties with one of his iconic catchphrases: “Come on, it’ll be fun”! And, of course, it always was.
John is survived by his sister Susan Rust and her husband Joe, as well as their daughters, Jennifer and Lindsay Rust, who loved “Zio Gio”, and whom he loved in return. He is also survived by his grandnephew, Julian Campbell.
John also has many cousins in Canada who will miss him. Perhaps mourning him as much as his family does is his cadre of “Best” friends, including Gary Adkins, Mary Heebner, Macduff Everton, Mark Moran, Beverly Pringle, Barb Wood and so many others he touched with his wit, spirit, gentle demeanor, vast knowledge and immeasurable talent.
John will be buried in Greensburg, Indiana, and a memorial event will be held at a later time not yet determined.