We caught up with the brilliant and insightful a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

John, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I come from what I call the ‘sheer force of will’ school of painting. I’ve had limited formal training, but have spent many many… MANY hours studying and copying paintings by the great artists of the past. Sometimes when I come face to face with one of these master works, say a Rembrandt, in a museum, I go through my typical emotional repertoire of awe followed by bewilderment, which invariably devolves to envy, dejectedness, and wonder at how fast I might be able to run with this thing under my arm. But another part of me is thinking, what’s the big deal? It’s just paint on a canvas, right? Just paint that has been mixed and pushed around into a particular shape and position (a painting is an 3D art object, not just an image) and left to dry. But then when I get home and look at my own work I wonder why my paint doesn’t look as good as his! Why can’t I make my paint do that?

Some of the difference is down to the type and quality of the materials used back in the day, and this is where the search for secret mediums, balsams, varnishes, etc can become tempting. I remember years ago trying to dissolve amber resin because Salvador Dali said he used it. It’s pretty easy to go down that rabbit hole and before you know it you have converted your studio into a materials laboratory. And never get any real work done. But what conservation analysis has shown time and time again is that the old masters’ secret medium was nothing more than linseed oil, sometimes heat-bodied. So what you are really and truly looking at in those paintings is skill and raw talent! So you can go on eating your heart out. But the real lesson I learned is that simple is best, learning to do the most with a limited set of variables. Just look at how much Jimi Hendrix did with just a Stratocaster and a Fender amp!

Painting doesn’t come as naturally to me as it does to many of the artists I know. It has been, and still is in many ways a steep learning curve. I work, eat, sleep, dream, and live my life on that ever present curve. But fortunately, I don’t make egregious errors anymore. Over the years I’ve become much more technically wily and can meet pretty much every challenge that comes along. Knock on wood!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m an American artist living in Ireland. Even though I’m originally from the US, I’ve spent nearly half of my life living outside its borders, in Japan (twice), Greece, Spain, and now Ireland where I’ve lived in a small rural town with my wife, Louise, and our 3 cats for the past 8 years.

I knew I wanted to be a painter since I was in high school, but didn’t have the confidence to go forward with it until much later. I’m a late bloomer for sure! My professional career began in Japan as a teacher. I was there for a total of 12 years. When I eventually returned to the US (LA area) I started moving closer to a career in art by going into the video game industry. I worked for a time with Gwen Ballantyne, another artist you have interviewed (https://canvasrebel.com/meet-gwendolyn-ballantyne/).

I have a few guidelines when it comes to ideas for painting. The first thing is that I never ever sit there and consciously try to come up with an idea on the spot, somehow trying to will something into existence. Instead, I take an oblique approach. I send notes to myself, usually email, with a description of the idea whenever I happen to come across something worth considering. I usually live with the idea for a time to be sure it really is good and not something that only seemed good in the moment.

Once I have something worth pursuing and have assembled all my reference material I start establishing the composition. It must be instantly readable, meaning that the main point of the piece must be readily understood by the viewer. For me, the best way to do this is to assign appropriate roles to each of the main elements of the composition. There should be the star front and center followed by elements in supporting roles. They shouldn’t compete for attention with the star, but instead accent and complement it. Each element is assigned an appropriate spot in the hierarchy of the comp elements. Silhouettes are also an important consideration. Everything must be clear and unambiguous. Even ambiguity must have clarity!

This method works well for me and I’m rarely at a loss for ideas to paint. And for those times when I feel like I’m coming up short I just check my email backlog.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

While working in the game industry the software I used for designing game assets (ex Maya, 3D Studio Max, ZBrush, etc),  I found could also be used to work out the compositions that I would later use as references for paintings. I continue to use these programs instead of the sketchbooks that most artists use. It’s what works for me. I made game assets by day and continued to work on my paintings by night and slowly over time moved forward in developing a proficient skill set. It also helped being surrounded by many talented artists in the game industry who I often went to for critiques and advice.

Around that time I discovered the Lowbrow/ Pop Surrealism genre and devoured every issue of Juxtapoz magazine. I also went to a lot of gallery openings in the LA area, ex Copro Gallery (Copro Nason in those days), Merry Karnowsky, Corey Helford, etc and got to know some of the artists and gallery personnel. I made it a point to find out how they did it and what the galleries were looking for. Now, I’m happy to say that I have shown, and sold, my work in all these galleries as well as Dorothy Circus Gallery in Rome,  Musée Halle Saint Pierre in Paris, Jon Beinart Gallery in Melbourne AU, Jonathan Levine in NY, and Last Rites also in NY.

But the gallery that gave me my first big break was Roq La Rue in Seattle, which is owned by Kirsten Anderson.

I’ve told this story before so I will only do it briefly here. In ’06 I moved from LA to Seattle for a fresh start. I already knew about Roq La Rue and that was a big part of my decision to go there. I didn’t have any connections, though. When I eventually got hired at Snowblind Games I met Brian Despain who was working there as a concept artist and found out that he not only shared my interest in the same art, but he knew Kirsten and had been showing his personal artwork at Roq La Rue for a while. He in turn introduced me to Kirsten and eventually she invited me to participate in some group shows. My pieces sold, my technique and personal style improved and became more distinctive, and she invited me to do a featured show with Brian. All but one of my works sold, and the unsold piece eventually sold as well. I started getting requests from magazines and got the cover of an edition of the Seattle paper ‘The Stranger’, and have since had my work featured on the covers of multiple magazines and books in the US and Europe.

btw- helpful hint: if a magazine requests an interview always make it a point to ask for the cover. It doesn’t hurt and you never know!

Alright – so here’s a fun one.  What is your view on the use of AI in art?

This is one of the most divisive topics in the art community right now. I have artist friends who hate everything about it, and others who are curious to see where it leads. I don’t have strong opinions about it one way or the other… yet, mostly because it’s so new. But having said that, I do recognize the threat it poses for many artists, especially those who work mainly in digital, like concept artists, digital painters, Manga artists, etc. Some of those jobs could vanish entirely and leave a lot of truly talented people high and dry. What would normally take a concept artist many hours, days, or even weeks to realize the vision the art director has in mind can now be done in minutes, and at a minuscule fraction of the cost. It’s just too tantalizing for production houses to ignore.

Just today I saw on the news that Tyler Perry had halted indefinitely a studio expansion project estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars after seeing a demonstration of the new Sora AI that produces video via text prompts. From a business and production point of view, why invest in all that overhead when you can crank out production quality videos on your iPad while relaxing in bed?

I recently did a test to see how close the AI (Midjourney) could come to matching the composition of a painting I did several years ago of Abraham Lincoln. After only a few tries it produced something quite close to the painting. It was pretty rough, but all the main elements were there, including the lighting. And it did all that in less than 10 minutes! I remember how hard I worked on developing that comp using heavyweight cg programs over the course of a couple of weeks. And to think that most of the main aspects could now be had in a single bound!

But if I can do this with one of my works, so can anyone else who writes a prompt, even the same prompt I used! And that goes to the heart of the controversy. Who owns the rights of the images that are produced? And what happens if the AI spits out a version of an artist’s work that generates greater demand than the original piece that inspired it? What if it becomes popular enough that it sells and makes money? Do they have any legal recourse? And even though they own the rights of the original work, could the prompt eventually be copyrighted and the artist gets sued for using it on their own work?

And then there is the ethical problem of appropriation of specific artists styles. Even if it might be legally claimed that an AI piece bears no similarity to any particular extant work by a particular artist and thus be protected from appropriation/ plagiarism charges. I think that at the very least artists should be able to opt out and maintain autonomous control of their individual styles that they have worked so hard to develop.

In any case, it’s certain that we are just at the beginning of the AI revolution and there are lots of twists and turns ahead. ‘So you’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin!’

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