John draws inspiration from universal themes and his life experiences. “I’ve always painted life, in a visual sense, what interested me, and painting has been a way to make sense of my surroundings. I grew up in my parent’s grocery store, drawing on butcher paper to pass the time away. There’s never been a time I was not interested in drawing or painting what was around me.There have been three major periods in my work and now I’m in the fourth. The figurative paintings came first and followed by the landscapes, which is what I became best known for, and then the narrative (which included the large-scale ecclesial works that combined landscape and figurative) and now the fourth period, a seascape/figurative/narrative period. This fourth period came rather suddenly and really began 25 years ago with photographs and drawings I did on-site at the beach. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, and I set the drawings aside.
In 2014, I began the paintings for Painting in the End of Days and Casting For The Unknown. On the surface, most of these works depict nude figures casting nets in the surf. In our current age of information, we are long on information and short on content, so I pared down the information element and made these new works with a stark, yet abstract element, so the viewer had to interject their own content or experience. Basically, I was looking for that which is implied in the abstract, in all three elements (landscape, figurative, narrative).”
“There is little mystery in our contemporary world, little that is unknown. This new work gives a respite from all that and may open new doors or ways of thinking.” (quote from Ken Rollins, Curator and President, Rollins Fine Art)
I live in Plant City, Florida, with my wife, Betty, a writer, and a dog Stella. We have three grown children and seven grandchildren.
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