John Paul McCaughey
John Paul McCaughey
In my work, I draw inspiration from the distressed buildings and defaced walls of the inner city. I am attracted to these structures for their visual and textural properties, the cracks, chipping paint, poorly removed graffiti, overgrowth, and flashy advertisements. I love how cities age, how they evolve… embracing their past while also looking to the future. It is a parallel to how I develop work in the studio. I find beauty in the discarded, juxtaposing old with the new, and blurring lines between organic and manmade. Part of my process involves manipulating made and digitally produced materials to create something that is visually balanced and texturally complex.
The acts of painting, sanding, screen-printing, collage, and décollage have become ways of developing a mass of colorful and textural diverse collage material that I can quickly layer into my compositions. My in-progress work is often fed into photoshop where I further tinker with the colors and placement while adding effects like gradients, pixilation, and overlays. Variations of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black have become common colors in both my two- and three-dimensional work. This color scheme references how computers make sense of and depict our world.
I draw inspiration from the mid-twentieth century greats such as Villeglé, Warhol, Richter, Twombly and Rauschenberg, but my compositions are also heavily influenced by the writings of James Bridle and the New Aesthetic art movement aimed at blurring the line between physical and virtual.