Website

http://www.johntallman.com

Relationship status

married

College / University

University of Washington

Program

Painting

Graduation

15 June 1993

Member type

Artist

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

Conceptual, Drawing, Installation, Painting, Sculpture

I am...

ready to rumble.

About my artwork

Another Artists Statement

My work uses an autonomous yet highly structured containment field that allows the mixture to seek its own level. Gravity, as well as the nature of the chemical reaction itself, influences the look and feel of the piece. At the same time, the finished work here is like a cross-section of an ongoing thought process.

The color I use is meant to evoke(but not overtly depict) our everyday, consumerist world where every corporation attempts to own and brand a specific color. The marketplace is flooded with “Sprint” yellow and “Baskin-Robins” pink. Is it beautiful or just memorable? I am, perhaps vainly, attempting to take plastic color back and make it something personal and joyous.

My paintings and sculpture seek positioning but yet lack specific realization in a conceptual
sense. I try to make my work as physically present as possible. Therefore what is truly
concrete and fully realized physically lacks guide posts, cultural labeling and outside sourcing.

Things that truly exist, exist without being tagged. They exist without identity, or rather without being identified. My work exists within acceptable conventions. I don’t attempt to
redefine standards of beauty or roles of art, too much. But within those conventions I
hope to create alternate modes of viewing. I wish the viewer upon approaching
my work, will be nudged to reconsider their own approach to viewing.

I never want to repeat a composition or fall into the trap of a set formula. At the same time, I limit myself to a self-contained “abstract” vocabulary. Balls, circles, forms, squares, rooms, colors, shapes, marks, lines, shadows, and light tumble, sit, float, bump, act, and interact with each other in the field of the (mostly) two-dimensional surface. I let the vocabulary lead the way. I start with a fuzzy and undefined desire to “make” something and then I go from there.

I placed what could be interpreted as a large “empty space” in the center of my work. Unlike so many of my contemporaries, I knew my work wasn’t a political statement, a personal narrative, or a form of cathartic therapy.

I think many (if not all) artists are faced with the shadow of “meaninglessness” hovering over their work. Out of fear, they self-consciously seek to layer and inject their work with “meaning,” inadvertently rendering it vacuous. I want to make objects that seem simple, where the depth you see in those objects is in proportion to the depth you bring to them.

Artists I like

Palermo, Magritte, F.Kline, Guston, Hesse, Beech, Forg, DeKooning, Wall, Tuttle, Caravaggio, Ryman, Turrell, to name a few.

Interests

Reading about the American Civil War, walking in the woods, music.

What exhibitions are good at the moment?

I live in Tennessee and I don't get to see a lot of good exhibitions. Color Field at the Frist in Nashville was okay.

The centre of the artworld is

nowhere and everywhere