Featured Artist

"I have thought of myself as an artist since third grade when my classmates started asking me to draw things for them. For awhile, maybe it was only a week, I spent every recess drawing pages of airplanes, aircraft carriers, and battleships. My friends would then play war by covering the drawings all over with arcing lines that indicated a shot had been fired and scribbles that showed a hit. I missed getting to fight the battles myself, especially making the sound effects, but I loved being recognized for drawing the best armaments. I have been drawing continuously, at times obsessively, for more than fifty years. My choice of materials comes and goes and comes back again: pencils, charcoal, conte, ink, crayons, china markers, pastels, chalk.

Over the years, I have drawn anything and everything (with the human figure as a constant) : portraits, self portraits, apples on reflective surfaces, Chinese take out cartons, Wonder Woman’s glass airplane, rubber animals, nuns, swimming goggles, copies of Caravaggio, Velasquez, Homer, Hopper and Diego Rivera. Through all the changes in materials and subject matter, what has always been true is that I love making marks and seeing them accumulate to reveal an image.
I also paint and make prints, but drawing has always been more important to me."

-- John Kotula