John Newsom

John Newsom is an American painter born in Hutchinson, Kansas. Newsom is best known for combining multiple techniques of formal painting strategies onto large-scale canvases, featuring dynamic spectacles of the natural world. In 1992 he completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at The Rhode Island School of Design and subsequently moved to New York City, where he attended New York University’s studio arts program. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from NYU at the age of 24. Newsom has recently been the focus of several early-career survey exhibitions presented at notable institutions, including The Richard J. Massey Foundation for the Arts and Sciences in New York 2011-2012, as well as MANA Contemporary located in Jersey City, New Jersey - held in 2015. Published in a 2015 monograph of Newsom’s paintings, art critic Barry Schwabsky writes in his essay, “Beneath his thick and sensuous painted renderings of flora and fauna is a grappling with the giants of abstraction. What keeps ‘strong painting’ from becoming merely muscle bound - is Newsom’s secret weapon: the discipline that comes from considering himself, not a painter of images, but rather an abstractionist ... to appreciate his paintings is ... to engage with their surfaces of purely sensual incident.”

Newsom has exhibited extensively in The United States and Europe, as well as Japan. Articles and reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and The New York Times, among other notable periodicals. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Hammer Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Neuberger Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery and The R.I.S.D. Museum.