John Mills's Page

Relationship status

married

College / University

California College of the Arts

Program

Masters of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing

Graduation

21 May 1999

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Painting

I am...

a committed artist.

About my artwork

My work is a repository of broken signs. Early Modernist abstraction and elements of cubism are interlaced within a matrix of linework integrating elements of television cartoons and comics with hieroglyphic markmaking. The result is a mess, wherein a core or unity is formed with the absence of marks, the negative space.
For me there is relevance in this empty space. Fragments and truncated forms are draped over an empty field. The result is an analogy of existence. The painting is a mirror, reflecting the minds’ construction or representation of reality on to its surface.
My work starts with drawing. The initial marks are important for me. I think of an image as a conglomeration of parts, like letters in a word that add up to a sentence. Meaning is constructed from the context of these parts. This is the beginning of representation. Representation is analogous to recognition. To recognize something is to “represent” it in one’s mind. We have a storehouse of recognizable things in our brains. I think we take for granted this fact, forgetting that at one time in our lives, all things were new and unrecognizable. This is the profundity I see in images and language. Our ability to put these signs, marks or letters together to construct meaning is always amazing to me.
There is also a sense of pathos in my work. My markmaking is aggressive at times yet often anemic in its coverage of the surface. This correlates to the linguistic nature of my work, but also speaks to the fragility and anxiety of our times.
The complexity of signs and information in our lives adds an almost impenetrable depth to these philosophical concerns. I am left to contextualize my work within a dialogue that considers these issues as well as the scope of modern and postmodern art forms. In an attempt to describe this condition, my work literally and conceptually scratches the surface.

Artists I like

Andy Warhol, Matthew Barney, Jeff Koons, Gabriel Orozco, Thomas Hirschorn, Gerhardt Richter, Jonathan Lasker, Richard Tuttle, Jay Erker, Philip Guston, Peter Halley, Barnett Newman, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Brian Bress, Robert Irwin, Jessica Stockholder, Cindy Sherman, Tomma Abts, Amy Sillman, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella, Monique Prieto. To name a few.

Interests

Cycling

The centre of the artworld is

New York, LA, my studio

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http://www.artreview.com/profile/JohnMills
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