The Spirits Print

Biography Jack St. John was born and raised in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, and currently lives and maintains a studio in Bedford, Ohio. After brief career as an engineering student at Case Western Reserve University, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Kent State University, with a concentration in painting, After that he participated in the Post-Baccalaureate Certificate Program in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited regularly in both local and national group and juried shows. Over several decades, his practice has explored a variety of picture making styles and strategies, from highly realistic still life painting to large scale assemblage to his current direction of non-objective mixed media work on paper and canvas. Artist Statement My art represents a register of all the moments of art-making, the second-by-second evolving conspiracy between thought and action that occurs in front of the paper or canvas I am trying to solve the visual and emotional riddle that the first application of marks and color and media put forth. The pieces are informed by the attention I direct at the world around me-and in me-during that creative experience. The pieces relate to the world around me, but are resolved in an intuitive way. Using an expressionistic visual vocabulary I expand upon and distort the observations of and feelings evoked by natural and man-made environments and their interweaving. Marks and colors denote the shifting relationship they have to each other, while the overall direction of a piece is pushed along by the contrasting visual and tactile qualities of the varied materials I am using. I work with the physicality of paint and related materials, keying on their qualities of heaviness/lightness, translucency/opacity, facture, dryness/wetness-and I use those often contrary qualities to make and organize marks into articulate abstract surfaces. I am finished when the constituent, formal parts, however demonstrative or idiosyncratic in themselves, unify, knit together to create an imperative, resonant composition, a field of decisions made, the result of a process through which I may know myself for a few moments.