John Wallace
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John Wallace, a professor of painting and drawing at Western, received his BFA from Washington University under Paul Burlin & Carl Holty. He began exhibiting professionally while pursuing studies with artists such as Skowhegan's Henry Varnum Poor, Jack Levine, Ben Shahn and David Smith. After completing his MFA at Indiana University under Alton Pickens, Wallace became involved with physics, an area of interest that would later help launch him on a fifteen year exploration at cosmological themes, for nearly five decades of a professional life in painting. Wallace was featured in the October 2002, Litchfield County Times Monthly and in Gallery/Studio Feb/Mar 2007 |
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Wallace's art is a combination of current scientific observation and an educated imagination. He works with images from satellites and NASA space probes, and photographs done with his own Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. His subjects range from today's revolutionary findings such as the discovery of quasars, gravitational lensing of light rays, neutrinos, and supernovae (exploding stars), back to Galileo's 17th century, then revolutionary work 'The Starry Messenger, the subject of his 1995 show at Blue Mountain Gallery, and earlier discoveries from ancient Greece, Egypt and England's Stonehenge, an observatory built almost 5000 years ago. Wallace's paintings are entirely based on reality and direct observation, but there is an element to the work that has a surreal quality engendered by aesthetic interpretation. Not so unusual, if you consider that he also studied with one of Paul Klee's best students, Warner Drewes, and got a firm grounding in Klee's concepts and didactics. |
Einstein Ring: Gravitationally Lensed Quasar 2000 Watercolor, egg tempera and oil pastel on paper 30 x 23 "
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| Wallace is currently represented by Blue Mountain Gallery In addition to regular solo exhibitions at Blue Mountain Gallery Wallace has had solo shows at the Washington Art Association, CT, the Provincetown Group Gallery, MA; and the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM; and numerous group exhibitions including Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY; the Artists Choice Museum, NYC; The Stamford Museum, CT, the Provincetown Art Association, MA; 'Bertrand Russell Centenary Exhibition, Nottingham, England; the Brooklyn Museum, NYC; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and the SL Louis Art Museum, MO, Purchase Award 1950, 52, 54. |
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He has also been awarded two Research Grants from Connecticut State University, an Artist-in-Residence Fellowship Grant from the Roswell Museum and Art Center, a Huntington Hartford Foundation Resident Fellowship in Painting, Los Angeles, CA and a Margaret Tiffany Blake Mural Fellowship, Skowhegan. He is published in The Sun, the moon and the stars, Richard Whelan (First Glance Books, 1998) and appears in Who's Who in American Art, from 1976 consecutively to 2000 (Marquis Publishing); Who's Who in the East, 1986, and Who's Who in the World, 1998 John Wallace's work is in the collection of the SL Louis Art Museum; the Dank Institute of Arts, MI; the Roswell Museum; and Joseph Pulitzer Junior, Morton D. May and other private collections. As Wallace summed up in a 1995 interview with writer Lionel Bascom, his work is "much like snapshots that record moments in a 'brief history of time,' as Stephen Hawking says. And, all of the observed parts at the universe are nothing more than this because we live in a constantly changing universe. And R's always changing, marked by these man-made events like Galileo's 'Starry Messenger' and shows like mine....' |
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Solar Eclipse with fractured plexiglas and
light 12" x 56" |
