John Fincher

JOHN FINCHER has created art that celebrates what the artist terms modestly “the trappings of the American West.” These “trappings” encapsulate references that are both familiar and totemic of the Great American Frontier and its mythic role as a reservoir of pride, strength, individualism and renewal. 

Fincher’s art explores diverse art historical and personal references to offer new understandings of America’s natural and cultural landscapes. His images of towering poplars, pine limbs set against crystalline skies, richly hued desert hillsides, the array of colors within canopies of aspens turning, and aggressively cropped prickly pears unravel the manifold cultural meanings inscribed within representations of the mythic American West. Elsewhere, as in an enigmatic painting of a lone padlock and a suite of serially repeated images of shaving brushes, the artist transmutes commonplace objects into powerful expressions that compound the equivocal with the intensely diaristic. 

With essays by James Moore, William Peterson and Mila Pajes Merriman, as well as an extensive interview with the artist, this is the first comprehensive volume dedicated to John Fincher’s forty-year career.