John Holcomb is a Kansas painter picking fights with art history.
Artist StatementI've been drawing since I was a child, and the question that has followed me the whole way is the same: what does a picture actually do to the thing it depicts? Every image carries instructions — about who belongs in the frame, who gets to look, and what looking is supposed to mean. My work is an argument with those instructions. Every subject I paint came to me with a history it didn't ask for. That's exactly why I paint it.
In The Original, the women in these paintings were never the object within them — they are the reason the paintings exist at all. I don't construct the figure. I encounter her. The painting is a record of that encounter, not an imposition of my hand. In Chroma Cowboys, the same instinct turns on American mythology. I take the cowboy — America's most mythologized icon — and recast him in high-chroma, feminine color. Saturated teals. Pastel lavenders. The silhouettes stay familiar; the color has other ideas. Feminine color on a cowboy reads like ornament. It isn't.
Across all of it — the cowboys, the figures, the florals — the method is the same: rogue color, economy of mark, imperfect line. Together they detach an image from its inherited role. I'm not interested in painting the world as it has been seen. I want the one that got painted over.
BioJohn Holcomb is a painter based in Kansas working in oil pastel over acrylic — a combination that gives his work its signature feel. It’s loose and instinctive on the surface, with real structural intention underneath. His paintings focus on the female figure, florals, and the American frontier, but what connects them is less subject matter and more mental. The work is bold, direct, and unapologetic about color and chalky line usage.
He thinks about painting the way a good listener works — not as someone who speaks over what's in front of him, but as someone who waits until understanding arrives. In his The Original series, the woman in the painting isn't raw material to be shaped — she's the reason the painting exists at all. In his Chroma Cowboys series, the cowboy — America's most loaded icon — gets recast in high-chroma, feminine color. What reads as decoration is actually revision.
Holcomb has been represented by Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery — with spaces in London, Miami, and New York — since 2016. In the decade since, he has shown in two solo exhibitions, 5 group shows, and many art fairs over the years. He works exclusively in originals. No prints.
Outside the studio, he's been chasing similar obsessions since childhood — Matisse and Gauguin on the walls, Tarkovsky and Rivette on screen, and the Ramones and The Muffs on wherever music lives. In between he records himself playing many instruments, purely for the pleasure of it.