CURRENT EXHIBITION
Meditations on Relentless Impermanence: The Brokeneck Mountain Exhibition by John Hulsey
Cider Gallery | May 29th - June 19th
John Hulsey
Recently, I had a freak accident, fell and fractured a vertebrae in my neck, creating what the doctors refer to as a “hangman’s fracture”. My break was the least serious of those kinds of things, the worst cases being unthinkable. Healing will take some time, it is another mountain to climb, but I will be fine. A thing like that, coming out of the blue, as it did, can change the way a person thinks about their life and perhaps their priorities.
As I was creating work for this exhibition at the time my accident happened, I realized that the opportunity to reshape my vision for this it had been thrust upon me. I began to think about the threads of thought which have tied together and powered my work over the last 45 years. I have been fortunate to travel extensively, painting in the National Parks and so many other beautiful places in the U.S. and Europe. I’ve painted rivers and mountains, marshes and seashores, prairies and deep, old-growth forests. They all speak to me with the same voice: Be here, Now. Not so easy to do, that. When I have been able to eliminate distractions, I have seen Nature open up to my gaze. Veils drop when I quit trying to interpret or label what I’m seeing. That’s when I pick up my brush with confidence, trusting in my feelings and the information before me. At those moments, I no longer have to craft a picture, to exert control. Nature is not a landscape painting. It is a living, breathing, constantly evolving mega-organism of which I am a part. We are in each beautiful, perfect moment, Now, and never the same again. That is what I’m trying to put into my work, for as long as I can. If there are any revelations here, they are not mine to hoard. It is my duty to share them. I hope they resonate with you as well.
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John Hulsey is an artist, author and teacher who has been working professionally for over fifty years. He has traveled extensively to paint in the U.S. and Europe, where he teaches painting workshops in Italy and France. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his paintings have been included in many corporate and private collections: The Environmental Law Institute, Washington, D.C.; The Hudson River Reference Collection, Garrison, New York; The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The United States Embassies in Australia and Jordan; and The Albrecht- Kemper Museum of Fine Art, St. Joseph, Missouri.
In 2010, John and his artist-wife, Ann Trusty, launched an educational website, The Artist’s Road, in order to encourage, inspire and share their life-long experiences as professional artists with others. Together they authored two books on painting: Nocturnes - A Primer on Night Painting, and The Field Guide to Plein Air Painting in Watercolor. John has been awarded painting residencies by the National Park Service at Yosemite, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain National Parks.
During his career, he has also produced commissioned paintings for major publishing houses, including Random House, Little, Brown and Co., Readers Digest, and Time Magazine, which featured his watercolor portrait of Margaret Thatcher on the cover. His fine art has been featured multiple times in American Artist Magazine, Watercolor Magazine, Fine Art Connoisseur and International Artist Magazine, where he was named a Master Painter of the United States. In 2019, International Artist Magazine asked him to create a seven-part series of articles, A Painter’s Journey, which chronicled the development of his large solo exhibition, Transcendence, which debuted at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Missouri, in February 2023.
In 2023, John’s artwork and television interview for Colour in Your Life, was placed in a time capsule on board NASA’s Viper Lunar Rover and landed on the South Pole of the moon as part of the Lunar Codex project.
Constance Berdan Sherman (artist and faculty member of the State University of New York) wrote in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition The Forces of Nature at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art:
"John's paintings represent, re-present, give us back our presence in the landscape and our feeling of existing in it under the sky. This is a grand gift in all senses. We need to be reminded occasionally how the light embraces, and then moves on. There is some sort of magic in capturing the instant with this degree of perception.”
Visit John Hulsey’s website at: www.johnhulsey.com
John Hulsey and his wife live outside Lawrence, Kansas with their dogs and working cat.