The primary advantage of painting over other media is its capacity to provide intrigue both as a material itself and to create illusion and space, to be both reality and unreality. To explore this wonderful contradiction I make mostly small paintings with hand made and painted frames which are born out of observation of things and places I see and come to know through extended periods of looking. The things are generally flowers and simple items and the places are the places I roam and love in and around Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey. These scenes allow me to see new shapes, colors, and patterns that I arrange into interesting intimate pictures. Once the thing or place is looked at long enough, and the colors and shapes that make it up are remembered and known, I can then move onto dealing with them as simply formal elements of a design to be moved or altered to best serve each other within the bounds of the painting. These small paintings present themselves as objects first, as color and shape and mass. As they are approached, they recede, and they become pictures, with spaces and figures and atmosphere. My primary concern is that in the end the painting elicits a mood and visual experience analogous to that of my initial observation.
John recently moved back to Southern New Jersey after living and working in Philadelphia for 10 years. He graduated with an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2013. He currently teaches as an adjunct faculty member at Rowan University
