John Tookey trained at the Sir John Cass School of Art, London and has exhibited with the Royal Insititute of Watercolourists, the Royal Oil Institute and the Pastel Society of which he is a member. In 1985 he was commissioned by the publisher Gordon Fraser to produce a series of paintings of East Anglia for a book "East Anglia in Watercolours" which eventually appeared in 1986 (and which is no longer in print).