Terry St. John came into his own as a painter when he found what his paint could do by wiping it away and brushing it back again. “There’s a dimension we don’t understand,” wrote Milton Resnick regarding de Kooning years ago. “In other words, if you have a landscape or an interior you have a space. You can deal with it in terms of image or what not. But you can’t really understand what paint is doing. Paint is doing something you ask it to do in order to get the nose on somebody’s face. The paint also does something that isn’t the nose on the face. What it does is fascinating. It’s a new geography.”… read more

Video of Terry St. John & Matt Gonzalez: In Conversation, from the opening reception of Terry St. John's "Figures, Landscapes & Still Lifes: Six Decades of Painting," June 3, 2017.… read more

The huge crowds at SFMOMA’s Matisse and Diebenkorn show prove two things: Bay Area Figuration (BAF) has an enduring appeal; and that, even in our deeply unserious culture, serious artists learn from serious artists, tribal elders whose work speaks across time. Terry St. John has a long history in the BAF tradition, having studied informally in college with his friend James Weeks, himself a Diebenkorn student. After earning an MFA, St. John went on to an illustrious career as painter, curator and educator.… read more

DCG Artists Jennifer Pochinski and Terry St. John are both featured in Abstracts From Life: Bay Area Figurative Past and Present, running through September 10, 2017 at the New Museum Los Gatos.… read more

St. John divined: In the past couple of years, as he approaches 80, Terry St. John has wrung from his painting a gravity and intensity long implicit in it, but long tempered, perhaps, by the sense that plenty of time to go for broke creatively might yet remain.… read more

A survivor of the mid-20th-century figurative-art sphere, Bay Area painter Terry St. John demonstrates his roots in that significant circle, and also explores fresh, abstract terrain, in an exhibition of recent work. Titled, with a fitting lack of frill, “Terry St. John,” the show continues at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery through Aug. 30.… read more

Terry St. John has been painting for over 50 years. Now an elder statesman of both landscape and figurative painting it can be said unequivocally that he is part of the canon of West Coast painting. But it hasn’t always been this way. As a young man St. John thought he was suited for a life of business administration. Later he ventured into sociology, earning a BA in the subject from UC Berkeley. But it was an encounter during his last semester in college in 1958 with high school friend Henry Brandon, who was studying with Richard Diebenkorn at the California College of Arts and Crafts, that compelled him to pursue painting seriously.… read more

Bay Area artist Terry St. John, who is 79 and paints out of his Oakland studio, has a new solo show at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco that brings together his decades of work and influences, from the Bay Area Figurative painters to his plein air studies, his female nudes and his move toward abstraction.… read more

Terry St. John’s nudes are bodies of substance and weight, the result of his spontaneous response to a live model and his profound understanding of physical structure. St. John studied with James Weeks at the California College of Arts and Crafts in the 1960s, and he carries on the tradition of Bay Area Figuration. Like Diebenkorn before him, he casts the figure as the empathetic protagonist of a relationship of color and space.… read more