About the Artist
John McDonald
Following undergraduate study at the University of Southern Mississippi I attended the University of Georgia. At the end of my junior year at Georgia, I was chosen by Yale faculty members choosing from candidates worldwide to be one of fifteen students for full fellowships for the Yale Summer School for Art and Music in Norfolk, Connecticut. Returning in the fall to Athens, Georgia, I finished senior year and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
Thereafter, I was invited to attend Yale University’s Fine Art Masters Program, and there for two years to study with some of the world's most significant artists, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1978.
After graduate school, I taught drawing and painting part time at the University of New Haven for two years, while maintaining a full schedule in a private studio near the Yale School of Art and Architecture. During this time I made the first of many returns over the years to many of the great museums of Great Britain and Europe.
After a season in Manhattan I went to work for Guggenheim Museum. I spent the next four years working in art inventory and installations; following the Guggenheim working with the Museum of Modern Art, the Rothko Foundation, the Dia Art Foundation and Pace Gallery.
During this period an ordinary day at work was literally a hands-on experience with some of the finest 19th-century, modern or contemporary paintings and drawings from around the globe. For instance, at the Rothko Foundation I was involved in errands to locate certain extant Mark Rothko’s and the set-up for subsequent division of his work by his heirs into the estate and into the foundation collection, a division of some 900 works.
For me as an aspiring young artist those years working with these various art collections was an invaluable form of higher education. I would say my own studio work during this time was less about self-expression and more of a study in form and color.
Aside from my formal education and training, my inspiration has familial Mississippi roots. I was preceded in kind by my father, who was mostly self trained with a talent for catching perfect likeness in a portrait, and my older brother Eric, a professional artist nationally known for his portraits and marine paintings. Besides my immediate family, my great uncle was the late Walter McDonald, a professional artist with a long and brilliant career, my first cousin was the late Michael Wood who created one of Carlos Santana's fantastic album covers; and my younger first cousin Ken Weathersby, is currently showing some inspiring new work in New York.
In Mississippi in the fall of 1985 I suffered a serious back injury The following new year I was on the coast in the last phase of recovery and hesitant to return north. Simultaneously, I’d begun turning to the landscape for new inspiration, a process of becoming reacquainted with the natural beauty of the coast, a place of offshore islands, inlet bays, bayous, marshes, giant oaks and piney woods. But it was by sheer providence, a welcome freedom from many uncertainties, and a slow awakening to a new proposition. The coast inspired a turning point and a commitment in my work where all of the formal experience and training as an artist finally began to take hold in something of my own. Returning to the coast with new eyes allowed me to see things fresh and it looked like home.
A Note about hurricane Katrina
I’ve often been asked how did hurricane Katrina affect me or my work? I did lose many pieces in private collections with the onslaught of the storm, for instance, a set of four paintings in a home on the beach in Biloxi disappeared with the storm, but the portrait of the Butterworth Brothers was saved ahead of rising waters by the father who left the house with it as if it were a Sophie's choice. In addition, I lost a large collection of stored work and equipment. One remaining difficulty is in recovering good photographic records of pieces I liked which have apparently been destroyed.