John Connell

John Connell (25 June 1940 – September 27, 2009) was an American artist. His works included sculpture, painting, drawing, and writing.

Life and work Connell was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He attended Brown University, in Providence, RI (1958–1960), the Art Students League, NY (1960–1961) and New York University (1962) where he studied Chinese print making. His first show was in New York in 1962.

In the mid-1960s, he moved to California, where he worked as the set designer for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, he worked primarily in the Southwestern United States, where he painted large murals and was visible in New Mexico's most respected art galleries, being part of the Santa Fe artist group Nerve and gaining a reputation for his large installations. He is particularly well known for his drawings, some of which are done in charcoal and spray paint and can be as large as twenty feet high and thirty feet wide.

Connell used plaster-of-Paris in the 1980s, and later turned to tar, paper and wax, in large figurative sculptures. He also used bronze, cement, wood, and chicken wire. His works on paper sometimes include elements of collage. In the early 1980s, he mostly gave up using commercial paints and began making his own out of iron oxide and pigments. His work has also included elements of writing and occasionally audio tape.

Connell's influences included Hokusai, Rembrandt, Balzac, Dante, Giacometti and De Kooning. Buddhism is a central theme,

Death Connell died on September 27, 2009, in Mariaville, Maine.

Projects Some of his better-known projects include: The Construction of Kuan-Yin Lake (1982–1989): A multimedia project that included sculpture, painting, writing and audio and was partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Raft Project (1989–1994) : A giant sculpture/painting project with painter Eugene Newmann. It was commonly perceived as being a takeoff on Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa.

Public collections holding his work

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas The Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico The Hess Collection, Napa Valley, California Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Las Vegas, Nevada Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, California Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Scottsdale, Arizona University of Arizona Art Museum, Tucson, Arizona University Art Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico