John Donnelly currently lives and works as an artist and professor in Mount Vernon, Ohio. For the past thirty-five years he has been a professor of art at Mount Vernon Nazarene University. He is a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He earned his BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Tyler School of Art and Temple University Abroad , Rome, Italy. He earned his MFA in painting and drawing from Indiana University. He is a recipient of residency fellowships and grants from The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The Vermont Studio Center, The Clipperton Project in the Faroe Islands, Denmark, The Orein Residency at Mount Savior monastery, NY. He also has received the Ohio Art Council Individual Artists fellowship grant. John has also donated his work every year since 1989 to the Art for Life, Equitus Health auction and fundraiser exhibition. 100% of the sales are for HIV/AIDS research and medical assistance, which has raised millions over the years. In 2023 Donnelly’s work received the highest bid in the live auction hosted at the Columbus Museum of Art. He is represented by Art Access Gallery in Bexley, Ohio. Donnelly’s work is widely exhibited and collected.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My artistic practice is grounded in painting and drawing. It is the search for a painting within itself, with which I am interested. Through a variety of materials, I mine the core of my encounter with the creative process. The experimentation with various mediums such as oil, ink, shellac, marker and collage may lean into figuration, each influenced from my explorations during my travels, but with the goal of finding the painting or drawing. They are not a mere representation of something I have seen, rather what I have experienced is a catalyst to the mark-making and the discovery of each piece. I am trying to get out of the way of the work; hence my process is entered into with little predetermined idea of what it should be or may become. Staying open to the work, is much like discovering a new land. The practice of wandering in the work is important to my creative process. My frequent travel to places such as Italy, the Faroe Islands and other foreign countries steeps me in an unearthing of layers of personal experience and global history. Attentive to the painting’s surface, color, or mark I strive to evoke a visual lapse of time. I leave space for translation, interpretation, and new ways of seeing for both me and the viewer. As my work is excavated, it resides in the gap between figuration and abstraction. Awareness to the present moment is also a part of my daily practice. I address this ephemerality of the present life through the fluidity of material while searching for an authentic touch of the surface. The content isn’t the subject of figuration like a skull, landscape or sea, but of the encounter formed in the process through painterly experimentation. My gestural mark-making and color with which I grapple to find the painting and the essence of a transcendent moment, are akin to the experience of music without lyrics. The work doesn't settle, consequently there is a descent into a more ambiguous space, much like dissonant music. The paintings and drawings rest on and beneath the surface in their materiality, where form is no longer clear, yet not melted away either. It is a fleeting moment worth chasing.
The painter, Willem de Kooning said it best and I agree, “Content is a glimpse of something, and encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny - very tiny. Content.”