Artist Bio:

John Coppola is an American fine art painter, lecturer, and writer from New York.  He received his preparatory training in drawing and painting at the Art Students League in New York City where he later went on to pursue his artistic degree, an MFA in painting awarded in 1995 from the Graduate School of Figurative Art at the New York Academy of Art in Manhattan. His work has sold independently to private collections in Umbria, Italy, as well as Shanghai and Beijing, China.

Artistic Statement:

My artwork revolves around one topic: what it means to be a human being. The technical goal has always been the same, to join abstract and figurative art together into an organic whole.

​

I don’t think when I paint or draw. I look and feel.

​

I was trained as a figurative painter and draftsman. I am a great fan of Italian Renaissance painting. I began seriously painting after seeing a British television documentary on Raphael in the early 1980s. I was entranced by the images, mystified about how Raphael produced such indelible, incredibly perfect images over 500 years ago with no modern technology. I wanted to find out how he did it.

​

The human figure can still be a primary subject of incredibly deep artistic and spiritual expression. My portrait and figure drawings and paintings are an attempt at that expression. They are deliberately simple, conceptual in content and are never based on models, they come directly from my mind and hand. I am primarily interested in the portrait as symbolic as in the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian and later Modigliani.

​

As for my more abstract and landscape painting, I am a student of my own mind and consciousness. Both my conscious and subconscious are the sources of my imagery. This painting is instinctual, a totem of my emotional and psychological state when created.

​

I use many materials for my paintings including oil, acrylic, watercolor and also Chinese painting ink and paper.