John Sheridan was born in Detroit in the days when cars had fins like fish
and now paints, collages, works and studies in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Growing up in America he has seen the bizarre myth of our culture close up
and has tried to embody some of its contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences
in art.
Believing art can partly redeem an often violence-loving, materialistic,
and imperialistic society he continues investigating several art forms, including
collage, and abstract liquid flowing paint combined with hand-painted images
mined from America's forgotten cinematic and commercial working class artistic
history.
Developing an aesthetic embodying solidarity with and analysis of his working
class upbringing and against the prejudice of American culture against its
own working class (and apparently every other living thing), he is interested
in the distinction between the art produced by this working class and more
rarefied art.
He loves art and enjoys imagining it is 500 years in the future when this
era will have been consigned to landfill and his true audience will be able
to see what is left of his work, since he is in no way reconciled to painting
for the contemporary crowd.
It is this hope for a better (aesthetic and spiritual) future that draws
him on. In painting he often evokes imagery created by nature itself combined
with deeply felt references to some of the most well-designed images ever
produced in America to gain insight into both - nature and culture.
