BIOGRAPHY

John Beardman was born in Youngstown Ohio December 5, 1937. He moved with his family outside Warren at the age of twelve. He attended Case Institute of Technology (now Case-Western Reserve) and graduated from Oberlin College. He also attended the Sorbonne and Stanley Hayter’s “Atelier 17” in Paris. He holds two advanced degrees from Southern Illinois University. A painter since he began on the family farm at the age of nineteen, he earned his living as art professor at: the University of Connecticut, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Oakland University from 1961 to 1990. Since 1990 he has dedicated himself solely to painting in his loft at 430 East 10th Street in Manhattan.

He has exhibited at various galleries, including one person exhibitions in New York City at: Denise Bibro Fine Art, Allan Stone Gallery, O.K. Harris, the Jayne H. Baum, and 55 Mercer galleries. In Louisville, Kentucky he has exhibited at the Brownstown Gallery; in Birmingham Michigan at Art Space. He has works in both public and private collections including NBC, Best Products, Harry Bober, Allan Stone, Florence Barron, Cornel West, Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. In addition he has received numerous creative artist’s grants and fellowships. Testimonials have come from people in the field including Donald Kuspit, April Kingsley, Karen Chambers, Meyer Shapiro, and Albert Elsen.)

Reviews include: Ann LANDI in March 1999 Art News, Grace Glueck, New York Times, Feb 26, 1999, Art in Review; Karen Chambers in Review Magazine, June 15, 1998; Ken Johnson, New York, Times, Dec 12, 1997; Michael Brenson, New York Times,1974; Jean Herskowitz, Cover magazine, October 1998

Artist’s Statement

I’m caught in the mill of shifting life as all are who live. Painting is my expression of that process. Most forms occur to me while glimpsing the work fresh, “out of the corner of my eye” as it were.

Dealing with a form that has historically long past has made me more inventive and more defiant of convention and fashion.

The spark that I’m trying to fan is small and easily forgotten, but very deep and quite formative

My work is haptic; it has to do with touch, perception of touch through sight.

Each major shift in my art comes about when I am sequestered for a significant period of time. Paris, Rochester Mi, New York, Cape Breton. The milieu affects the work, but the solitude is the same. And the awareness of integration that solitude brings is the same. Sort of like the movie Home Alone, only the bad guys are within.

In working much is destroyed. I watch beauty being destroyed all the time. I live in Cape Breton. I watch the sunsets. I garden and I paint.

The rules are simple: go to the breaking point, hold it there, find the humor.

I have spent most of my adult life encouraging the urge to find form.

Much of that search involves dealing with the past. What has been and what might have been can meet in the present, if we can give it form. It’s not like the past is revisited. It’s like there is no past, it’s all now.

Email: john.beardman@gmail.com

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