John Erickson

John Erickson was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 1976 he received his BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Utah, studying under the direction of Alvin Gittins and Douglas Snow. In 1975 he attended The Summer Fellowship at Yale University, studying with Wolf Kahn, Louis Finkelstein and Phillip Guston. John returned to the University of Utah for graduate school and received his MFA in 1981. After graduating, he began teaching painting and drawing at the University of Utah and has been an Assistant Professor there for over twenty years. He also teaches workshops in the Helper, Utah art community.

John enjoys a variety of media including latex, acrylic, oil, collage, and oil pastels. His love of nature stems from having spent a lifetime in the outdoors hiking and exploring the backcountry wilderness of Utah, the western United States, and while traveling internationally. His works are an exploration of chaos and order, action and reaction, despair and solace. John’s longtime study of figure structure gives grounding to free brushwork and reflective boundaries, broken and kept.