John Connell

John Connell (Atlanta, Georgia, 1940 – Mariaville, Maine, 2009) was an American artist whose work spanned sculpture, painting, drawing and writing. Working across the second half of the twentieth century, he is remembered for experimenting with space and unconventional materials.

He studied at Brown University in Providence from 1958 to 1960, at the Art Students League in New York from 1960 to 1961, and at New York University in 1962, where he studied Chinese printmaking. His first show took place in New York in 1962. In the mid-1960s he moved to California, where he worked as set designer for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s he worked mainly in the American Southwest, painting large murals and exhibiting in New Mexico's leading galleries, and he was part of the Santa Fe artist group Nerve.

He is best known for his drawings, some in charcoal and spray paint, which could reach twenty feet high. In the 1980s he worked in plaster of Paris and later in tar, paper and wax for large figurative sculptures. In the early 1980s he largely stopped using commercial paints and made his own from iron oxide and pigments. His work also includes collage, writing and occasionally audio tape. His influences included Hokusai, Rembrandt, Balzac, Dante, Giacometti and De Kooning, and Buddhism is a central theme, with wabi as his aesthetic ideal.

Among his best-known projects are The Construction of Kuan-Yin Lake (1982–1989), a multimedia work partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Raft Project (1989–1994), made with painter Eugene Newmann and commonly seen as a response to Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. His works are held in museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.