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John was born in 1972 in Santa Clara, CA and grew up in the southern bay area. He graduated from Mountain View High and went on to attend U.C. Davis where he studied Landscape Architecture. His love for painting never really ‘started‘. Instead he saw painting as a sort of natural progression of his seemingly ever present interest in visual representation. Like most children, he started drawing as a means of interpreting the world and giving his vision of his surroundings or the expression of his situation a tangible form.
"This is what I am still basically doing in my painting with the addition that now I am far more aware of the tradition of image making and place my work in the context of other painters. I draw from what I perceive to be the best efforts of other painters to refine my understanding of the formal richness that painting affords to translate experience. While I minored in art at U.C. Davis, I didn’t really start honing in on how I should paint till I graduated and began painting intensively in my parent's garage. There, I experimented for a few years with varied forms of representation and abstraction. Eventually, I settled on representational painting as my efforts with abstraction seemed to gravitate towards an obsessive minimalism as I preoccupied over increasingly slight modulations in the formal elements of a work. However, my experimentations with abstraction helped me to become more proficient with my chosen medium, acrylic paint, because as I turned down the volume, so to speak, it forced me to handle the paint in a very detail oriented way..."
John prefers to keep his insight on development of imagery on the mysterious side. "I have noticed a variety of themes and settings that I revisit but they are not something that I decide ahead of time. I have to gather information and references for my imagery as the painting develops. Characters change age, gender, costume, etc. over the course of a work. One day the central image might be a pose of a man standing in a boat with a long paddle heading up river. The next day has him in the same pose but pushing a skateboard and dragging a tarp through a suburban cul-de-sac"
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