John Marshall Stubbs

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In my latest collection of work, I’m challenging the mythology of the Wild West, by filtering the nostalgia for rugged individualism through contemporary aesthetics. I draw inspiration from pop art, surrealism and impressionism, but explore the temporality of the current moment, using digital tools like Photoshop to create early drafts of my paintings. These are deserts with drop shadows.  

I spent my life around art, always drawn to the use and understanding of perspective to give dimension or distortion to a flat canvas. While studying art in Florence, Italy, I was enamored with the Trecento period just before the Italian Renaissance. In this pivotal moment in Art History  we used shading techniques and color theory to give curvature to figures but hadn’t yet grasped the concept of point perspective.

Here, I am implementing early understandings of perspective with modern tools and practice. Using drop shadows to create flattened figures and depth that seems to pop off of the canvas. This use of perspective blends well with the melancholy landscapes of spaghetti westerns and the larger than life characters in Texas history. After all, many western film sets were flat backdrops in a movie studio. My works are at once an homage to a simpler understanding of history and a recontextualizing of the romantic notion of the American frontier.