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| We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.1 | |
| We not only invent, we build and then tell the story. Where did they come from? Why are they here? Building upon building upon cars upon roads upon streets upon people upon story upon story... Taking the invitation of Guston to explore a personal narrative using public iconography, St. John builds the painting, one thing at a time, commemorating “a Life Lived”. | |
| In the painting A Perfect World/Just Do It, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass comes together with Gerhard Richter’s Atlas to commemorate the passing of our values. St. John, who listens to great speeches while painting, returns to his socio-political concerns in the painting I need beer, a sardonic comment on our progress? | |
| Painting with history, both public and private, Grow’d up wrong is a painting spotted with the memories of growing up in Indiana topped off with thE R from Ricki Lake, a “White Trash Nation” under the unrelenting grayness of a midwestern winter. The painting Home Alone is just that, the detritus from a night, up until dawn, alone. The painting In a daze ‘cause I found god finds its title in a song by Kurt Cobain, an ironically sincere conclusion about belief. What do we believe? | |
| Our actual experience | |
| St. John’s varied use of materials and surfaces for the individuated presence of characters, places, and objects is a specific choice that best describes his interest in the portrayal of experience. The connection made between the concrete and the idea create a time and space of experience, the gap between art and life. It is in this “Gap” that St. John believes narrative possibilities exist. | |
| Since 1999 St. John’s development of the possibility of narrative/history painting has matured into a singular voice that exists by virtue of being unlike anybody else. Made up of dreams, visions, reality, personal interpretation and the pretense of objectivity...St. John’s American story is a vast landscape of cacaphonous events enveloping a history of public and private inclusiveness, “surrendering to the intoxicating effect of the metropolis and the erotics of its spectacle”.2 | |
Michael St. John 1 Joan Didion, The White Album 2 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life |
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