Drew:We met at a party a couple years ago in the West Village. I think David Cerny was there too. It's a bit foggy for me because the parties in that house overlap for me and there is always a Czech in the mix. But I do remember visiting you in your studio in Jersey City, New Jersey shortly after and being amazed by all your books, depth of interest and knowledge in art and your array of works in progress. We talked for hours but I do not think we ever really spoke much about ourselves so please introduce yourself here and tell us a bit about your upbringing. I recall you studied in Paris but where are you from originally? There is something Canadian about you.
John:
No, not exactly Canadian, I'm from small-town in western Massachusetts. My family founded and ran the local Newspaper there. Some of my ancestors were French-Canadian, and we lived briefly in Quebec City when I was a child and so that maybe why you thought I was from there. I guess you did a say “a bit” when it came to telling you about myself. I think I misread that at first, so here a year or so later I will try to encapsulate the memoir I was working on in answer to your question. It would go something like this: I’m a New Englander via Paris (Beaux-Arts 1987-92), now more or less a “New Yorker” (since 1995). Encouraged by my mother, I first took drawing lessons at age 7 with a former WPA artist (John Phelps). Later at age 14 I began private study with a Russian Émigré Artist (Shimon Okshteyn). It was the rigorous classical training in drawing that made the basis for the Soviet Socialist Realist Style combined with a semi-impressionistic manor of Landscape, Still-Life and Portrait Painting that looked a lot like turn-of-the-century Russian Art. At the Beaux-Arts, with little direction beyond that of the old Masters in the Louvre, I spent years trying to master representational concepts by working from imagination/memory. This period of study terminated years later when I was able to research anatomy in depth at the New York Academy. The point was, and I think still is, to draw and think in the same moment while watching the drawing unfold. I found the mimetic process dissatisfying because of that interruption, i.e., look at the drawing, look at the model, look at the drawing. During a period when I lived back in Western Massachusetts before coming to New York I became interested in Architecture which led to considerations of light and space from a very different perspective. This coincided with new areas of exploration in my work, culminating in the creation of a series of minimal and rectilinear reliefs very different from anything I had ever done. Though I didn’t continue in that vein at the time the door had been opened to possibilities only now realizing themselves in my work. Like almost every artist I know the reality of a “day job” has had a singular impact on the work not only in its limitations, but in unexpected gains. In my case the field of Architectural Painting has offered the experience of travel, both national and international, an exposure to the language of ornament and a diversity of methods and practices specific to that field. The introduction of some of those i.e., gilding, stenciling, wood graining have been the vehicle for whole new areas of subject matter I am currently exploring.
Drew:You now live and paint in NJ. You are a short subway ride away from NY and are in the periphery of all the museums, galleries and buzz of Manhattan. In terms of getting into the art market and art world it makes sense but does it make sense as an artist for inspiration, creativity and the space you need or is that gravitational pull too strong and do you find yourself thinking too much with NY in mind, perhaps catering to a certain audience?
John:
Jersey City has provided me with affordable live-work conditions which are pretty much the deal-breaker for artists in this town. I’m not unique in feeling that I never take advantage enough of the cultural opportunities available, so I won’t elaborate on that well-worn subject, but I do feel more at home in the kind of urban and international environment that is NYC. Because of my family I still feel connected to New England and do manage to exit this bubble from time to time. On a practical level, my chances of survival are better here professionally and as an “emerging artist” I’m still paying my dues. As far as audience is concerned, I hope that my work has a broader reach.
Drew:
Growing up studying the arts I considered styles - inherent abilities, movements - premeditated manifestations and periods (i.e. Picasso's blue period) - tidy historical reflections. How does a modern sense of a "series" fit in to all of this? It seems like you genuinely pursue your panel forms with a true sense of exploration the way Modrian, Smith or LeWitt explored basic shapes but the
feeling I get from a lot of other artists, especially photographers is that they have to come up with a packaged concept first and then flesh it out, which seems limiting and a bit backwards. Does this staged approach stem from gallery demands or coffee table books in mind or do you think it is just a way for an artist to create structure in an amorphous field and give him or her something to focus on? I feel it is more often a matter of convenience than the monomania Claes Oldenburg spoke of, in which the subject, means everything.John:
I think most of us work better within some kinds of limits. To work in a series or recognize it as such during the course of a work helps one to narrow one’s focus. There are market pressures, for sure, to produce something stylistically recognizable as coherent, but more important is the necessity for clarity. With something as nebulous as metaphor the perceiver instinctively knows when a piece is trying to be too many things at once. Also, at the risk of being banal, you just get better at something doing it repetitively. To answer the first part of your question: my work is partially process-driven and that process involves a kind of formal research, so as you suggested, it’s not predetermined. In many ways I usually pick up where I left off.
Drew:
I remember you were doing large decorative wall paintings as a day job. Disney World-Tokyo comes to mind as does another gig in Dubai, if I am not mistaken. This job has taken you around the world and it must have given you a unique perspective back at the level of your private creations and more personal scale. Do you still do this job and how has it influenced your paintings?
John:
I touched on this already in answer to your first question, so I would only resume here that most importantly it has expanded my sphere of references and techniques. It also has broadened my understanding of Art History in familiarizing me with a whole area of design that is neatly bracketed out of that narrative. There is one other thing, and I can’t say that this idea is thoroughly digested yet, but it has suggested to me a potential for the rejuvenation of a relationship between Painting and Architecture.
Drew:Originally, I had wanted to interview you for an article about creation myth...how the artist creates his or her character, which in turn, gives direction and a sense of purpose to his or her work. I think I was much more specific with the request, asking you what is your creation myth. Fortunately, I think you found this a trivial pursuit and did not respond. So, what is it that puts you where you are artistically? You have an ancestor (your grandfather?) who was a pretty well known photographer. What's the link there, genes or being exposed to that?
John:
The photographer in question: Alvin Langdon Coburn was a cousin of my Grandfather’s who moved to England as a young man and is buried there. He became quite famous for his photographs of famous men of the time and even though he was part of that Steiglitz “Camera Notes” circle was promptly forgotten. My father who had taken up photography for the family newspaper and had an interest in genealogy came across his work, but at the time there was no scholarship on him. That all has changed, there’s a big coffee-table sized book now available and you often see his work in the photography section of the Met. So it would make a nice “creation myth” to claim that there was some continuity between a remote famous ancestor and me, but that would of course be a lie. It is great that he has been rediscovered though, because he was an incredible photographer of the Symbolist School and participated in the English equivalent to Cubism, Vorticism.
Drew:
While reading Thomas L. Friedman's The World Is Flat, a book about globalization, I started thinking about how this topic applies to the arts. What have you noticed in the past decade in terms of art centers and audiences around the world? We used to describe cultural influences in military and colonizing terms, i.e. British Invasion. Are we still a bunch of isolated villages or has the World Wide Web really made Tokyo as accessible as New York...or perhaps even more accessible? Is the art world decentralizing...is the periphery vanishing? Where do you think the art market is going?
John:
I read that one as well and though I did find parts of it interesting I can’t get beyond his role in promoting the Iraq War in 2003 and being such a cheerleader for the Neo-Liberal economic policies that have gotten us into so much trouble. That said, whatever cultural models were in play in the post-war period are clearly in flux, but certain centers clearly remain. Beyond that I wouldn’t pretend to have anything knowledgeable to say on the matter. I think it does create interesting problems when considering the lack of a shared historical narrative between the different cultures.
Drew:I have commented several times to you about a haunting feeling I get when I see your older diptych painting titled Huntsville, Alabama. The left panel is a cool/cold colored painting of an airport/airplane gate extension without a plane. The right panel is a warm colored detail of a table, lamp and chair in what seems to be a hotel room. You feel the delay, the departure, the cold outside as well as the warm but generic and claustrophobic interior and it powerfully creates a very uneasy feeling of lost time and lost love. This painting works so well because it's out there but it is far from exotic and it is not obviously sentimental. It does what Hopper did but with fewer cues.
Your newer work is shape based, but not random like Arp. They are panels, swatches of color in shapes that reference cars and even guns, all very masculine. How did you arrive at this series? You have painted cars before and now it seems like you are just doing away with the canvas and the whole car and just sampling elements. Does this narrow or widen the range of responses? In a previous comment, I mentioned the designer sensibility in them, which IKEA could appropriate but that it is only a lead in to an experience at a much higher level.
John:There’s definitely a shared theme with Hopper in a lot of the earlier work I did, though I never consciously imitated him. I think his work reflects a vision of America seen from a slightly removed position and like him my experience of living abroad informed that perspective. The painting you refer to is meant to reflect the experience of a business traveler and the specificity of the title is ironic in the sense that it could be anywhere. The current work does bear some resemblance to Arp and I hope they have the same evocative quality that his work has. There was a period just before when the paintings were in between. They still functioned like conventional pictures with representational images inside the shapes. At some point I just took the leap. The shapes, color, texture, all, simply became the image.When you mention IKEA, it is true that they come dangerously close at times to just being table tops, but I find that friction interesting and part of the subject matter. In some way it reflects the personal associations we have with the most ubiquitous mass-produced objects.
In order of appearance above: "Bring It On", "Sunday, June 1973", Reliant, A. Coburn's Bernard Shaw & Auguste Rodin, "Huntsville, Alabama", Brougham, "Bypassed Place", Toboggan (2).