DesignSelect is proud to present this month's Guest Artist.
Featured Guest Artist Jack O'Hearn IV.
A resident of New Mexico and former resident of Massachusetts, Jack O'Hearn IV paints the urban landscapes, that surround us in our daily lives, with their graffiti walls and rusted doors -but somehow he manages to infuse in these mundane sites, a beauty and aesthetic appreciation that makes the viewer want to look at them. In essence he has taken the tarnished and tattered walls and made them beautiful. Within many of the works he incorporates a surrealistic or dreamy imagery of forms and animals that normally do not belong where they are placed; often the works contain self portraits of the artist.
Contact: Jack O'Hearn IV www.jackohearn.com.
The Artist on his work:
The ideas for my paintings begin from my sense for beauty. Subjects in the world around me that strike me as extraordinarily beautiful are the subjects that influence my work. Such subjects have been freight trains, urban walls and sidewalks which contain an abstract assortment of colors, shapes, numbers, letters, fonts, graffiti, rust and rot. With the use of cropping, stenciling, and trompe l'oeil technique these paintings become surreal abstractions of the subjects themselves.
My goal is to produce beautiful, realistic paintings of these subjects. Once the viewer recognizes a painting as a subject of beauty, he/she will recognize the subjects within the painting as such, leaving them with a different
perspective
as they encounter these subjects in their everyday life. They are an attempt to abolish society's stereotypes of beauty, and to generate artistic vision and imagination, which is attainable by everyone, but suppressed by society. Through my work, I hope to provoke questions such as, "If a wall can act as a canvas, why aren't cities covered with art? Or are they already covered in art? If so, what are the possibilities for this art to be improved and helped to flourish?"
myself as melampus
