Maureen St John: Watercolor

Maureen St. John has worked as an artist/educator for 40+ years. She attended Glassboro State College/Rowan University and the University of Pennsylvania. She has taken workshops around the world and locally.

She presently works in a wet-on-wet technique with  watercolors creating abstract and semi-abstract landscapes of intense personal moments created by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal. Her paintings are an attempt to establish a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver. With a conceptual approach, she investigates the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination.

Her work doesn’t necessarily reference realistic places but places influenced by the many places she has traveled. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. By exploring the concept of landscape in a nostalgic way, she tries to approach a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered way, she likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes physical and she believes in the idea of function following form in her work.

Her works directly respond to the surrounding environment and use everyday experiences as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context.