At first, the chromium oxide opaque green field streaked with raw sienna and specked with permanent green light and splotched with the darker burnt sienna under the lowering mixtures of whites and dioxidine purple and mars blackwas space, movements and relations that madespace, vitrtual jostling and dancing as he saw Cézanne's apples or Mondrian's rectangles move in perceivable energy. Those were formativeyears, when learning to shape color seemed shaping the future of modernism, so that this was also a space in history, though that was not apparent to him until much later. Later,after years painting in New Mexica, California, Colorade, Pennsylvania, and New York, this green field seemed to him clearly a burgeoning wheat field rapidly freeing itself from the now sparse patches of muddy clay that tried to suck it back into the earth, and it seemed that way for a long time, for all those years of certainty and facility when, having painted so many paintings, some unexplained and apparently simple way of painting turned out to work. He could see his landscapes in the paintings andthe paintings in the landscapes. It was magical, which is why he had good reason to believe in his paintings. But the times keepchanging, while the painter keeps deepening hissense of certainty. History takes him in orderto abandon him. That was sometime in the latesixties or early seventies, when history wouldnot stop for modernism and in a series ofquick, mincing stages stepped by. It was thenthat John had his dream. He was painting in alarge, airy studio. On his palette-table hestirred the globs of titanium white andultramarine blue, and as the acrylics streakedtogether with the consistency of FosterFreezes, he dipped his right forefinger intothe paint, scooped up the thick micture, andslurped it down. It tasted good. So, then, thepaintings seemed yet something else, a creedadhered to and defended, a stance against theproductivity of post-modernism, a style ofmonastic self-maintenance. He had decided tostand by himself and let history pass. It wasnot a bad choice; though it was one people whohad never been in history or out of did nothave to think about. Titian had made a similarchoice and so had Turner and Monet, Matisse,Picasso, and de Kooning. So, finally, there isa stillness in John's paintings, not just thestillness that all paintings have of beinglooked at, the quiet of the imaginationlooking, but now also a mutedness against time,like a faith in something permanent.
Max W. Yeh
Hillsboro, New Mexico
December 29, 1990
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