John Brosio’s oil paintings introduce towering monsters and pop cultural elements into the everyday, whether it’s a giant crab or a Big Gulp. The artist has a knack for mixing terror and humor, leaning on his talents in realism to add both components to the work. Elsewhere, he takes a childlike approach to rendering these beasts, reaching back to the sketchbooks packed with dinosaurs and fictional creatures as a child.
“Learning to paint has to do with continually learning to see and that’s the exciting part,” the artist says, in a statement. “The success of a painting in the end has so little to do with subject matter but compels us rather with how well it codifies the way in which things relate to one another in this universe. I think of painting as the pursuit of realizing some degree of surrender to these sensibilities through an orchestration of select relationships.”
See more of Brosio’s work below.
Fumi Nakamura