About John
A Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Florida and current Founder of oconnorartLLC, John A. O’Connor is a practicing professional artist with more than forty years experience in teaching, administration and community service. He studied art in Sacramento, San Francisco and Mexico City and holds an A.B. and M.A.A. in Art from the University of California-Davis. John taught at the University of California-Santa Barbara; Blake College, Valle de Bravo, Mexico; and Ohio University, Athens, before moving to Florida in 1969 where he taught art and art history, served as Interim Chair of the Department of Art, and founded the Center for the Arts and Public Policy–the first arts policy center in the US. He also founded the Florida Higher Education Arts Network–the first statewide association of fine arts administrators in public and private colleges and universities in the US. In addition to having 35 solo exhibitions and participating in more than 200 group exhibitions, John also served for many years as the Program Consultant in the Visual and Performing Arts for the State University System of Florida Board of Regents. He has organized numerous conferences and symposia including several on the Public Art Process and the Health Hazards of Artist’s Materials and Environments. He has been awarded numerous grants for his research as well as for his individual artwork. The links listed below provide a more detailed documentation of his expertise and accomplishments.
Artist Statement Career Summary ResumePDF Download Art Policy, Administration, and ResearchPDF DownloadArtist's Statement
By John O'Connor
Many things influence an artist's work. Concepts are forged from impressions, imagination, relationships, education, meditation, dreams, travel, language, other cultures, and various experiences of realities.
From about the age of three, I had wanted to be an architect. When I began the first of my many college experiences at Sacramento City College in January 1957, I primarily studied architectural design, mathematics, and Spanish. After two years there, I decided I had no idea what I wanted to do, so, in January 1959, I quit and moved to San Francisco and took a job with the State Compensation Insurance Fund while I continued to paint in the evenings and on weekends. That experience made me realize that I didn't know very much about art after all. I had a revelation: if I could admit that there was much left to learn about art and life, I probably ought to go back to college, become a serious student, and really learn about it. So, in summer 1959, I attended Sacramento State College's Lake Tahoe branch campus (now California State University-Sacramento) for an intense six weeks of painting and drawing with artist Fred Schmid who advised me to continue my study in Mexico. In the fall of 1959, I enrolled at Mexico City College (now University of the Americas) and began a serious study of painting and art history. I sat in on a graduate seminar taught by the renowned art historian John Goldberg, and I visited every Mexican Mural Movement site I could find. However, by the end of my second quarter there, my mother was terminally ill, and I returned to Sacramento in January 1960. From then until summer when I again enrolled at California State University-Sacramento (Lake Tahoe branch) and took additional classes with Fred Schmid, I painted on my own in a converted garage-studio at my home.
Bay Area Figurative
From 1958 to 1968, I worked in a manner known as Bay Area Figurative. I was greatly influenced by this vibrant, new style that was just beginning to emerge in northern California in the late 1950s. David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn are credited as the founders of this movement, and I readily acknowledge their influence on my early works.
However, it was studying with artists Greg Kondos and Wayne Thiebaud at Sacramento City College, and William Theo Brown, Roland Petersen, Wayne Thiebaud, and William T. Wiley at the University of California-Davis, and James Weeks at the San Francisco Art Institute, and my exposure to the work of Paul Wonner, that created the context for my early work to develop. Like many of these artists, I was aware of our extraordinary surroundings: the grand California land and seascape. However, during this time, I also explored a wide variety of subject matter that included the human figure and still lifes.
My art works during this time are characterized by vivid color, and a sensual, painterly and, somewhat, expressionistic style. I was also especially interested in the effect of light on interior surfaces. Many images were derived from personal experiences and observation in the mountains of northern California or along the jagged beaches from Monterrey to Mendocino. When I moved to Santa Barbara in January 1963 to begin teaching at the University of California-Santa Barbara, images of bathers, surfers, and the softer, more accessible, southern California beach scenes became a major interest. I also did numerous paintings of my wife Mallory and son Chris and painted some of the rock music stars of the 1960s.
Reality and Illusion
In 1968, I began to explore new ways of working. I had moved to Ohio in 1965 to teach at Ohio University, and my new environment was a shock to me. The landscape was completely different, the light softer, the air much more humid, and the sky was frequently filled with lightening of an intensity that I had never encountered. Although I continued to work in the Bay Area Figurative style after arriving in Ohio, I found it harder and harder to do so. As I responded to my new environment, I began to experiment with new ideas.
In 1969, I moved to Florida to take a teaching position at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Although it was déjà vu all over again, I had less difficulty continuing with my work because, since I was painting from my imagination, it was less environment-dependent than ever before.
I called the paintings from 1968 to 1986 Conceptual Realism. They are the record of a journey to explore the mystery of illusion and reality. My goal was to provoke thought about how we create our reality. Humor, paradox, deception, and riddle are aspects of this working/process. The result is conceptual realism—not new realism or photo realism. Everything in these paintings is invented. I didn't paint from objects, I painted from my mind. I was interested in things the mind thinks it knows, things seen but not apprehended, things perceived but not truly experienced. By 1986, this particular period in my art practice had completely evolved into the Blackboard Series.
Blackboards
Since 1985, the Blackboard Series has been the predominant form of my art. It grew out of work produced in the early 1970s, but the impulse that led to the blackboards was largely undeveloped and not recognized by me. Art has a peculiar way of telling an artist something that he may not understand for many years.
The blackboards images, obviously originated from my classroom experience where I had been surrounded by them for most of my life–first as a student, then as an artist-teacher. As early as 1963, I was interested in the idea of how natural processes could contribute to making a work of art. The blackboards are created using those kinds of processes. Erasing and moving borders become a history lesson: a history of the work itself. Wiping out and/or covering up images and messages goes far beyond the processes themselves. The procedure raises significant questions: What is covered up? Why? What is missing? Within this context, I have become interested again in the concept of the “history painting” in the tradition of such eighteenth century artists as Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley. In a1989 painting titled Erasing History, I explored the practice of manipulating “historical facts” as a form of propaganda; more recently, in paintings such as America and The New Ivory Tower, I have focused on the manipulation of words and symbols as “historical documents” used to sway public opinion and to reinforce popular mythology. In addition, the didactic quality of the blackboards allows them to be utilized to fulfill their real function: to inform, to explain, and to teach. It is interesting to note that one of the most influential educational innovations in America in the1870s was the introduction of drawing as a required subject in public elementary education. Drawing instruction was justified as valuable training in visual literacy. Teachers used the classroom blackboard to illustrate the basic principals of line, shape and proportion. For my own purposes, the blackboard is the ideal conceptual vehicle because it is the medium par excellence with which to manipulate ideas and material.
A critic once said that my blackboards reminded him of “those waxy tablets with the thin vinyl sheet over the top that some folks still remember writing on as a child.” He pointed out that such a device is called a palimpsest, a magic slate on which images could be drawn and then magically erased by lifting the vinyl sheet. Interestingly, the palimpsest was one of Sigmund Freud's favorite metaphors for the unconscious. Encountering my blackboard paintings, the viewer is invited to enter an environment of palimpsests: ghosts of gestures, the residue of images and words linking thoughts and concepts of visual entities and written language. They are the tracings of a life's journey. Partially erased, but not forgotten, my blackboards provide a dark window into the modern psyche. Like us, they may be but fleeting illusions, or they may establish our own reality against eternity.
It is tempting to suggest that both my Conceptual Realist paintings and their transformation into the Blackboard Series owe their form to nineteenth century trompe l'oeil painting and are merely an extension of that genre. However, that would be erroneous. One of the concepts that I have steadfastly developed is that of going beyond traditional illusionism. Typical trompe l'oeil painting, no matter how initially deceptive, inevitably breaks down under close scrutiny. In my blackboard paintings, I invite the viewer to question the nature of reality itself. Consequently, I have developed concepts and techniques to create realities that are the vehicle for such transcendence. All of my blackboard paintings are done in acrylic on board or Sintra–there is no collage. While I enthusiastically admire the trompe l'oeil masters of the past, my own work has evolved primarily as a result of twentieth century influences found in the works of William T. Wiley, Jasper Johns, and particularly, Marcel Duchamp.
Folding Screens
My notes on, and research into Oriental folding screens, dates back to the mid 1970s. Again, it was an inspiration that I did not even begin to start to fulfill until 1984. And, although I painted the first of the “Folding Screens” in 1984, and, even though I continued to research, makes notes for, and develop ideas about them, I did not fully return to this genre until 2005 with the painting Butterfly. My folding screens, while ostensibly decorative, encompass a space for private reflection–there’s more to them than meets the eye. Like the Zen koan, they also pose a riddle, a paradox, and an unanswerable question: illusion or reality?
The folding screens are a significant current interest. However, I am continuing to work on the Blackboard Series. And I am producing many examples of both forms of illusion and reality as "virtual" works of art. Using an i-Mac with a 3.06GHz Intel duo Core 2 Duo and a twenty-seven inch monitor and Adobe Creative Suite CS 4, I am able to generate numerous "scripts" for future works–some of which will be tangibly realized and others that will be available as commissioned works.
So, although my paintings have gone through several incarnations, they inevitably ask the same questions? And, since the questions can't be answered, they continue to motivate me, at seventy years old, to continue to explore what I initially set forth: an art forged from impressions, imagination, relationships, education, meditation, dreams, travel, language, other cultures, and various experiences of realities.
Micanopy, FL
July 2010
John O'Connor
Professor of Art, Emeritus, University of Florida
Founder, Executive Director, Emeritus, CENTER FOR THE ARTS AND PUBLIC POLICY
Founder, Executive Director, Emeritus, Florida Higher Education Arts Network
Career Summary
John A. O’Connor received his A.B. with Honors in art in 1961 (minors in Spanish and mathematics) and his M.A.A. in 1963 in painting and drawing from the University of California-Davis.
He taught art at the University of California-Davis from 1961-63, the University of California-Santa Barbara from 1963-64, Blake College, Valle de Bravo, Mexico from 1964-65, and Ohio University, Athens from 1965-69. From 1969, he taught art at the University of Florida (UF), Gainesville. He was named Professor of Art in 1985, a position he held until his retirement in 2005. During his time at the University of Florida, he taught courses in painting, drawing, art history, art law, and arts policy. He also originated, implemented, and taught in the M.B.A. Degree with Specialization in Arts Administration Program. In 1987-88, he was the Acting Chairman of the Department of Art.
While on Sabbatical and a leave of absence from the University of Florida in 1980-82, John A. O'Connor was Director of the Appalachian Center for Crafts, the nations largest and most comprehensive crafts facility, and a Division Director of the Tennessee Arts Commission. In 1983-84 and 1988-89, he served as the Faculty Program Consultant to the Florida Board of Regents. During these years, he conducted the first and second program reviews of the Visual and Performing Arts in Florida’s nine state universities. This process included arranging for and supervising nationally prominent arts administrators who participated in on-site reviews at all nine universities to examine sixty-four arts programs. He coordinated the consultant’s reports, wrote the executive summaries, and interpreted the consultants’ recommendations and findings for presentation to the State Board of Regents. He also served as Consultant on the Arts to the State University System of Florida from 1984-95.
He has directed two university art galleries: the Memorial Union Gallery at the University of California-Davis in 1962-63 and the University Art Gallery, Ohio University, Athens, in 1967-68. He also served on the committee that established the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida. His art gallery publications include Young Artists, John A. O’Connor, ed., University of California, Davis, 1962; Graphics 1968—Ultimate Concerns, John A. O’Connor, ed., Ohio University, Athens, 1968; David Hostetler, Yousuf Karsh, Dana Loomis, John A. O’Connor, ed., Ohio University, Athens, 1968; and Roland Petersen and Ralph Johnson, John A. O’Connor, ed., Ohio University, Athens, 1968. He has published other articles including “Unbottle Your Creative Ideas—A Cooperative Venture of Engineering and Art,” by John A. O’Connor and G. E. Nevill, Journal of the American Society for Engineering Education, 1972; “Learning to Design with Other Disciplines: Some Experiments in Teaching Mixed Discipline Classes,” by John A. O’Connor, Sixth Annual Design Conference, Detroit, Michigan, 1973; and “The Public Art Process in Gainesville: A Case History or How a Model Process Went Sour,” by John A. O’Connor, Journal of Arts Law, Management and Society, 1992.
John A. O’Connor is an artist who believes that it is very important to re-establish the artist’s historical contributions to the formation of public policy. He founded, and was the Director of the nation’s first arts policy center, the CENTER FOR THE ARTS AND PUBLIC POLICY (CAPP) at the University of Florida from 1987-2005. This center includes the UF Colleges of Fine Arts, Arts and Sciences, Law, Business Administration, Architecture, Engineering, Health Sciences Center, Harn Museum of Art, Florida Museum of Natural History, and the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. During this time, CAPP received numerous grants from various agencies including the Florida Humanities Council (FHC) and the Division of Cultural Affairs (DCA), Florida Department of State for programs that dealt with humanities and arts policy issues. A sample of programs sponsored or co-sponsored by CAPP includes Art and Healing; Controversial Public Art, the Legal and Ethical Dimensions; Censorship and Obscenity in the Arts: Public Attitudes/Legal Problems; Before and After Columbus: The Use and Misuse of the Past; Women in the Nineties: Sex, Power and Politics; and Culture and Art and the Livability of Communities.
O’Connor founded, and was the Executive Director of the Florida Higher Education Arts Network (FHEAN) from 1985-2005, the first statewide network of education policy leaders in all the arts in public and private higher education in the United States. In 2000, he co-edited Health Problems in the Arts: The Impact of Arts Practice, Materials, and Environments on Students, General Participants, and Professionals–the first book-length manuscript ever to include health problems in all the arts. In May 2005, he received FHEAN’s highest honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award.
He has had thirty-four solo exhibitions of his paintings—including a retrospective entitled Real Illusions: John O’Connor’s Blackboards and Their Origins (with works from 1968-98) that was organized in 1998 by the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and subsequently shown at the Schmidt Center Gallery at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton in 1999, the Thomas Center Main Gallery in Gainesville, Florida in 1999, and at the Kendall Campus Art Gallery at Miami-Dade Community College, Florida in 2000. A selection of the “blackboards” from that exhibition executed between 1985-98, supplemented with works from 1999-2001, was exhibited in 2002 at the Alexander Brest Museum at Jacksonville University, Florida in an exhibition entitled Palimpsests. Other retrospective exhibitions include John A. O’Connor: Conceptual Realism 1968-2003, held at the Pensacola Museum of Art, and the University of West Florida in 2003, and John A. O’Connor: Conceptual Realism 1968-2005, at the University Gallery, University of Florida, Gainesville, in 2005. These retrospective exhibitions were accompanied by a twenty-four page catalog with an introduction by August Freundlich, President of the Richard Florsheim Art Fund, essays by Richard Vine, Managing Editor, Art in America and by Peter Frank, Editor of Visions art quarterly and art critic for L.A. Weekly. In 2005, he also had a retrospective of earlier works from 1960-80 entitled My Art, My Life: Twenty Years of Paintings by John O’Connor, held at the Thomas Center Main Gallery, Gainesville, Florida.
O'Connor's art has been exhibited in more than two hundred group shows—including the 33rd International Festival of Painting in 2001 at the Château Musée (Mediterranean Museum of Contemporary Art), Cagnes-sur-Mer, France (one of sixteen American artists invited) and the 50th Annual All Florida Invitational in 2001 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art (one of fourteen Florida artists invited. He has received numerous awards including a Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1992-93, a State of Florida Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 1991-92, and in 2002-03, a University of Florida Professorial Excellence Program Award in 1998-99, and University of Florida College of Fine Arts grants for artistic exploration from the Fine Art and Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund in 2001-02, and in 2003-04.
His art is included in the public collections of Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; Edinboro State University, Edinboro, Pennsylvania; Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida; the State of California, Sacramento; University of California, Davis; and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire; and in the corporate collections of Alabama Power and Light, Birmingham, Alabama; Bechtel Corporation, San Francisco, California; Cole National Corporation, Cleveland, Ohio; IBM Corporation, Armonk, New York; and Industrial Indemnity Corporation, San Francisco, California. Additionally, more than forty private collections in the United States and Europe contain works by John A. O'Connor.
Art South/Art 4 Business in Philadelphia currently represent John A. O’Connor. He is listed in Who’s Who in American Art and in numerous additional biographical directories.