profile:
john holcomb.
kansas studio.
a structural dissent from art historical logic.
external representation:
rebecca hossack art gallery.
london. miami. new york.
2016–present.
practice:
oil pastel over acrylic.
works on canvas.
initiated 2007.
protocol:
original works only.
zero print distribution.
autodidactic. no formal institutional training.
artist statement:
“I've been drawing since I was a child, and the question that inspires me is still the same: what does it mean? What does a picture actually say about 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 arrived carrying a history it never chose. That's exactly why I paint it.”
“These paintings are corrections, not homages. I'm not interested in painting the world as it has been seen. I want the one that got painted over.”
field designation.
the practice operates within contemporary figurative painting. art historical appropriation functions as the primary subversive methodology. the work spans the female nude and frontier iconography. formal non-conformity is sustained across both. the studio functions within the chromophobic discourse of western art history. the central investigation: the historical tension surrounding the representational figure and the assigned palette of american masculinity.
filed under: contemporary western painting. chromatic gender critique. bloom. chromatic subversion. figurative non-conformity.
profile:
John Holcomb is a rogue colorist. He was born in Kansas, where the frontier and its myths never quite became history. He works in oil pastel over acrylic — a combination that gives his work its signature immediacy. Loose and instinctive on the surface, with real structural intention underneath. His paintings move across the female figure, florals, and the American frontier — three subjects, one obsession.
He paints from a position of attention, not assumption. In The Original, the woman in the painting needs no improvement — she's the reason the painting exists at all. In Chroma Cowboys, the cowboy — America's most loaded icon — gets recast in feminine color. What reads as decoration is actually declaration. In Bloom, his oldest series, the female form was always hiding in the flowers. It just took two more series to say it in paint more clearly. The work doesn't theorize about the figure. It answers to her.
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, five group shows, and at least three fairs annually for a decade. He works exclusively in originals. No prints.
John was raised in rural Kansas after he was adopted at age 9. Formal art training was not a part of his upbringing, but a natural curiosity for the drawn image was innate. Outside the studio, he's been chasing the same obsessions since childhood — Matisse and Gauguin on the walls, Tarkovsky and Rivette on screen, and the Ramones, The Muffs, MxPx, or Joy Electric on wherever music lives. In between he records himself playing guitar, bass, piano, and drums, purely for the pleasure of it.
studio parameters:
the studio maintains a rigorous adherence to specific structural and sonic parameters. music is categorized by a 2.5-minute duration standard. subtractive synthesis (moog) and electromagnetic induction (epiphone casino) function as primary instrumental specifications. these constraints extend to a visual and cinematic logic rooted in art house methodologies and sapphic iconography. the painting practice is defined as an exhaustive, lifelong pursuit of these unified variables.
filed under: punk rock. synthpop. felliniesque. lavender.