Cerebral: A John Wyatt Retrospective
August 30 - September 27, 2024
John Wyatt (b. 1945) is a multifaceted artist dedicated to the practice of creating and connecting. John grew up in the agrarian Lake Erie area surrounded by his mother’s Finnish cultural traditions and his father’s skill for engineering. Wyatt’s creative and artistic training is as complex and trans-dimensional as his art. Experience in New York’s mass printing industry, ceramic arts, carpentry, and a notable career in landscape design all feed into his process of making art. As a young father on Cape Cod John built his family’s home, a charming gardener’s cottage with a basement that served as a studio. It was in this basement John began to focus on “doing art.”
Through a web of connections, Wyatt moved to McDowell County, North Carolina in the late 2000’s. It was “a place to paint a new life.” Here Wyatt renovated and redesigned the interior of a downtown building and garden, creating a place for prolific production, often having three canvases in progress at once.
Cerebral traces Wyatt’s 35-year career from shore to city to private club, to feelings of connection, discontent, and lust. Using canvas, found objects, acrylic, enamel and pastel paint, Wyatt’s wildly varied style carries glimpses of the places he has lived and traveled through: New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts and North Carolina. The train tracks that run through downtown, friendships with locals, and ever-penetrative global news all echo Wyatt’s experience calling McDowell home.
“Sometimes the hint of something is more important than the something.”
Artist Statement
My drive to create is an answer to the question, what can I add to the story? How can I make people’s lives richer? How can I connect to the fullness of emotions—happiness, sadness, misery, joy? I want to leave images and objects that connect people to feelings and new points of view.
The images are already on the canvas. I look for different perspectives, bring them out, and offer something beyond myself. When I am in the process of creating there are no mistakes – only the opportunity to make it into something else and find what needs to be shared.
