Meet John DeFrancesco
John has been a local oil painter for over 30 years, moving to the Tri-Lakes area from Chicago in 1998. He was formally educated as a landscape architect and horticulturalist at the University of Connecticut, his birth state. John also served in the U.S. Navy for 21 years of active duty and reserve service.
John is well known in the community as a painting instructor in Colorado Springs for a decade at the Senior Center and here in the Tri-Lakes area, offering private instruction in his home studio in Woodmoor. He has also taught classes and workshops in various other local venues.
John’s interests in the natural beauty of the plant and garden realm are evident in many of his paintings. Subtlety and softness of mood are distinctive trademarks of his work.
John was influenced by Manet (not Monet), Pissarro and his uncle Andy, who was a successful commercial artist in NY. He is a self-described visual person who grew up delighting in the photos in Life Magazine- experiencing the emotion through the photographs that he now recreates in his paintings, often transporting the viewer into the scene by creating a story. John has received awards from the U.S. Air Force Academy, Pikes Peak Library District, Palmer Lake Art Group and the former Tri-Lakes Center for the Arts. John’s paintings are currently on exhibit at Bella Art & Frame in Monument. John will celebrate his birthday this month! Please join us, his wife Diane and his family and friends in wishing John a very happy 90th birthday!!!🎉
John’s Artist Statement🎨 I believe the ability to paint is a God-given gift that is to be shared. Therefore, I’m driven to record nature emotionally, not simply artistically. And I want to share the emotional experience with the viewer of the painting.
I work to capture, not just an impression of what I see, but an interpretation of what I feel. Sometimes that calls for subtlety and softness of mood; at other times it dictates boldness of form and color. Just as music is made playing one note after another, a painting comes together by placing one note of color against another. There are so many colors in nature that our brains don’t process when we look at an object. My task is to find the various nuances of color in any given scene and place them onto the canvas. That process produces a gamut of mood ranging from a rainy day to a meadow, to a sun-filled time at a beach, and everything in between. In viewing my paintings, if one feels the warmth of the sun, recalls a childhood memory of home or of an event, sees the river water flowing or senses the fragrances in a garden, then I have accomplished my goal.
