Born in 1967, John McCaw lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received his B.A. degree in Liberal Arts at California State University, Long Beach in 1993. He is best known for his heavily encrusted earth tone paintings that emphasize strong design and simple shapes.
John’s abstract paintings engage the two aspects of his academic studies in the arts and anthropology. Many of his works take on an organic appearance, as though dug up from the earth or washed up on the shore to reveal something from the past. These pieces of art are a way of assisting the beholder to see themselves in relation to the greater transformations of the past and the evolution of their own psychological worlds. This type of transformation entails a kind of symbolic self-involvement in the very process of life itself.
Many of John’s pieces suggest universal themes such as life and death, fate and circumstance, joy and sadness, human relationships, religion, graphic symbols, modern culture and so on. The ability to look beyond the object and seek a more profound understanding is simply more than finding answers; it involves the more abstract goal of finding “meaning.” Analogy, inferences and, of course, imagination help to interpret these works of art.
Just as the interpretation is individual, the process and application of producing John’s paintings are just as diverse. Some pieces are conceived, thought out and applied, while others are as spontaneous as the emotion that accompanies them along the way. Each work of art contains elements of life, bits and pieces that reveal the anatomy of our existence.
