Leonard St. John

Bio
I’m Leonard St.John, originally from Chicago, Illinois. Born in 1943. My interest in art began at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hyde Park Art Center. In 1966, I moved to Berkeley, California to paint and study History of Art. I painted a mural as an artist-in-Residence at UC Santa Barbara in 1971, while also working as a photographer at Ester Bear Gallery. During this time, the work became more geometric in character.
It has been my good fortune to have various patrons support me over the years by adding my work to their collections. I sold etchings in Paris in 1975 and created murals for Erle’s Jazz Club from 1980-1985. Nina Homisak has shown me every consideration in exhibiting my paintings since 1988 at her Albany studio. Now that I finally have a large studio, I am looking forward to resuming painting large format work.

Statement
My work these many years, has been a kind of squaring the circle with and in an assortment of gestural, geometric, and inventions that express a system of creative visual design. This abstract and often all-over structure brings together many of the principles of old and new abstract painting. An edge to edge dynamic can be experienced in the composition and the interior often repeats the framing agents of the canvas.
Often I combine gestural painting techniques alongside solid geometrics. The square, more and more has become the central element.
The variation of the colors used today are the development of more formal exercises in primary colors.
This contrast gestural-to-geometric refers to a real world of accident and chance beyond my control. This I call an American sense of space.
My work seeks to express the raw, violent and vast distances or enormous voids that accompany a sense of place - in the American space. And yet my uncertain grip on this style of painting is part of the structure of the process. This uncertainty is characteristic of our American non-tradition, issuing forth images of a people who have an uncertain grip on their environment.