International Artist Magazine
Aug/Sept 2007
ALL ABOUT PEOPLE

by John Ennis

I can't remember a time when the figure wasn't the central focus of my work. Even as a boy reading comic books, dramatic drawings of super-heros gripped my attention. Inspired, I drew dozens of my own comic books, and then enrolled in a local Saturday morning art class in my home town. Those classes gave me my first opportunity to draw the figure from a live model. I was still in seventh grade!

Since then I've had the opportunity to study with great instructors, and spend my entire adult life as a professional artist. Most days are spent painting people, sometimes in portraiture, sometimes in genre work, but always with the desire to fill my canvasses with life.

I attended art college and received a BFA, but the seminal moment in my education came with my decision to move to New York and study at the Art Students League. I enrolled in classes with Robert Schulz, and Jack Faragasso, and later studied privately with Michael Aviano. All of theses artists had themselves studied at the League with Frank Reilly, a prominent teacher and illustrator in his day. Mr. Reilly developed a teaching program based on knowledge passed down to him from his teachers Frank VIncent Dumond and George Bridgeman, and through his friendship with illustrator Dean Cornwell. Somehow I was lucky enough to stumble into this incredible lineage and wealth of knowledge, for which I am eternally in their collective debt.

While still a student, I began taking commercial assignments from book publishers. A great career for a young artist, book cover illustration gave me the time to develop my painting skills. It also allowed me the opportunity to work with models, to discover how to draw from them the emotions I needed for my illustrations. To get them in the emotional "zone ", so to speak. I like to think that artists themselves are works-in-progress, and I find the skills I learned as an illustrator carry over and help my work today. In those days, my influences were understandably illustrators like N.C. Wyeth, J.C. Leyendecker and Howard Pyle. Today I'm more drawn to painters like Valasquez, John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn and Robert Henri, to name a few.

It's not just their technique I study, but the humanity they bring to the canvas. Their insight into their subjects, and human nature itself. Technique is a great thing to have under your belt, and for many years I took pride in developing it. But to paraphrase Robert Henri, technique is useless without motive. And my motive is to make pictures that share my feeling about a subject. When I began figure painting I hired total strangers to model for me based solely on their appearance. Since then I've learned to paint people I know, and to get to know the people I paint, to bring some sense of who they are into what I do.

This process greatly translates into my portrait work as well. There are few art forms that lend themselves more to the expression of the human experience than painting a portrait. I use what time I have with a portrait subject to explore their life, their personality, the perception of the people that know and love them. When I step up to the canvas, I am searching for something about them, their character, their love of life, their place in our world, but ultimately I am expressing my perception of them, my interpretation. It's a shared experience and great fun. Left behind is a short but often intense bonding with an individual, family or group of people, and a legacy that outlives us all.

I live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, an area rich in artistic tradition. Today, as in years past, Bucks County harbors a wealth of living artists, and I am happy to find myself part of this community. Many of us paint together, from the live model, or in the landscape. We find ourselves elbow to elbow painting the figure, sharing ideas, socializing, museum-going and sharing this unique experience of making art. Recently I participated in an exhibit of our work, titled "Drawn Together", which the Trenton City Museum was happy to host for us. Aptly named, this show featured myself and four of my fellows. The exhibit focused on our figurative work and the camaraderie that brought us together. Says museum director Brian Hill, "Drawn Together was among the most well-attended exhibits we have ever had. With their figurative work, John Ennis, and the other painters in the exhibition, capture the subjects perfectly with excellent use of light, color and texture, reminding us of where all art started. In Drawn Together, they re-center the basic ideals of classic art "