Terry St. John

T erry St. John’s nudes are bodies of substance and weight, the result of his spontaneous response to a live model and his profound understanding of physical structure. St. John studied with James Weeks at the California College of Arts and Crafts in the 1960s, and he carries on the tradition of Bay Area Figuration. Like Diebenkorn before him, he casts the figure as the empathetic protagonist of a relationship of color and space. Prior to 1991, when he began to focus on the figure, St. John painted en plein air with Louis Siegrist, a member of the California Society of Six, who in the 1920s specialized in small landscapes of vibrant Fauve colors. St. John worked as a curator at the Oakland Museum of California for over 20 years (1969-1990); there he organized a definitive showing of The Six as well as a major full-scale exhibition of California Abstract Expressionism. The impact of both movements is registered in his painting.