EVERYONE WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND 36X25 INCHES GRAPHITE AND COLORED PENCIL ON PAPER 2010
VICTORY AT SEA 30X22 INCHES GRAPHITE, COLORED PENCIL AND OIL ON PAPER 2010
Seek and destroy 40X48 INCHES ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 2010
BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR 40X48 INCHES ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 2010
He Said She Said 56 x 50". ink, gouache, acrylic and graphite on canvas. 2007
"It's all behind you now". 89 x 51". ink, gouache, graphite and collage on paper. 2006
ONWARD AND UPWARD 54 X 60 INCHES ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 2010
old glory 70X90 INCHES ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 2010
your heaven looks just like my hell 86X108 INCHES ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 2010
eyes on the prize 96X84 INCHES ACRYLIC and oil ON CANVAS 2010
PUT YOUR HAND IN MINE 54X60 INCHES ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 2010
Artist Bio
“The New York based artist, John Copeland, is known for his large scale paintings and drawings, and on Friday he opens his first solo show in Denmark at V1 gallery. His field of investigation is human existence in terms of the social interactions, negotiations, and conflicts that is part of our everyday life.
Through an imagery of faceless, fleshy figures, skulls, cartoon characters, and animals he displays themes like sex, violence, abuse, power, and joy. This infuses his works with a strong undercurrent of both darkness and raw energy that defies any moral message, but rather mirrors the fight for truth, the lack thereof, and hypocrisy in all its deformities. Kopenhagen have met the artist before the opening to ask him three quick questions about his new works, the disruption between good and bad, and how to visualize the uncertainty of meaning.
John Copeland (f. 1976) was born in California where he also studied at California College of Arts and Crafts. He is part of a younger generation of prolific New York based painters revitalizing the narrative of contemporary painting and has had solo exhibitions at e.g. Galerie de Meerse (The Netherlands), Nicholas Robinson Gallery (NY), 31Grand (NY), and Juice Gallery (San Francisco). Next month V1 Gallery also presents another new solo exhibition by John Copeland at the invitational art fair in New York, Volta Show NY, from March 4th – March 7th. 2010.”
http://www.kopenhagen.dk/index.php?id=20777
Relation to my work
I love the interactions present in Copeland's work and can relate them to my work. Many of his paintings show groups of people interacting in a given space and incorporate the viewer. The content he chooses to show and the way that the information is cropped, really bring the viewer into the scene. In his drawings, I can relate to his play of size and scale. They seem pretty freeform but the end result is very interesting. It keeps my eye moving and trying to piece the scene together. I also really like the keyhole images where your focus is dead center because of the black frame. Lastly, I see similarities conceptually, in that he isn't trying to make some kind of argument and that he is balancing in between.
Inspirational Quotes
“Protagonists and antagonists. Vessels and metaphors. They are not specific individuals, I work pretty hard to stay away from anything too literal.”
“How we get along or don't, social issues, conflict, how we manage to keep going, this crazy place we live in, are all things that I'm trying to talk about. Trying to laugh, have fun and move ahead with it, let things evolve.”
“In many of them some social interaction happens, negotiating something that could be weird or easy, comfortable or awkward, some exchange in various forms. More specifically I am interested in what goes on under the surface, the physical vs. the psychological, a plurality of motives, intentions, and results. That is something that runs through all of the works.”
“I am also playing with people’s reactions, with the role of the viewer, the act of looking. For example, some works incorporate images from one painting into another, in one painting a crowd of people looks at the image of another painting with disgust or glee, creating both a response and dialogue between the two images.
I am not trying to make any moral argument at all. For me there is a plurality in things and I work very hard to have the works not have a definable or literal substance, I want them to be on the line of decipherability, of legibility. I have always pushed my work to balance on this tittering line.”
Artist Website
http://www.johncopeland.com/default.html
Gallery Representation
http://www.nrgallery.com/index1.php
http://www.v1gallery.com/
Interviews
http://www.fecalface.com/SF/index.php/features-mainmenu-102/473-john-copeland-interview
http://www.kopenhagen.dk/index.php?id=20777
http://1001journals.com/interview/john-copeland
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