Artist Anne John ‘inspired by the nature of things’

Anne John can’t forget the moment she knew she was an artist for life.

“I was 7 years old. I remember it like yesterday,” she said. “I did this beautiful drawing of rabbits and I went class to class at my school, uninvited, showing everyone what a great artist I was. That was the start.”

She’s come a very long way since that auspicious day in a Bellevue elementary school — and yet, rabbits and cats and birds and other distinctively mystical critters are sprinkled throughout John’s strange, symbolic artworks. So are people, based on friends and family who have modeled for her, and even angels, based on her endless curiosity and dedicated iconoclasm.

She wonders about angels, she said while perusing a surreal view of heaven — a bright room with windows and a tile floor — that’s leaning against a wall in her Hazel Dell studio. How do they give birth? Do they emerge from eggs? Do they requires shoes when walking down the street? What’s it like, dealing with those big wings all the time?

“Honestly, I’m inspired by everything,” said John, who has spent decades painting odd scenes, experimenting with ceramics, sculpture and other techniques, and daring the local arts community to join her in taking risks. She’s been fortunate to sell steadily, she said, and build relationships with numerous art galleries and collectors.

A retrospective of her works, “Then and Now,” is on display, and continuing through the end of February, in the downtown Vancouver gallery that John recently helped launch: Art at the Cave at 108 E. Evergreen Blvd. The gallery will be open late on Feb. 2 for the monthly First Friday Art Walk.

Abstract ’60s

John said she grew up in a family that attended the annual Bellevue Art Fair as faithfully as some people flock to the Clark County Fair. “It was a way of life,” she said. “It was a fantastic art show that featured well-known Northwest artists.”

John never did very well in school, she said, unless the subject was art. “All I ever wanted to do was paint,” she said. The serious-minded kid pursued private lessons with William Cummings and Liesal Salzer, who taught her to love portraying human figures, then studied art at Washington State University in Pullman — where she grew frustrated.

“It was the 1960s and the profs were all doing their thing,” she said. Pop art and pot-fueled abstractions were the order of the day, when John wanted to study figures and build more concrete skills. “I thought I knew more than the teachers. I didn’t feel challenged.”

The best thing about college, she said, was meeting her future husband, Jerry John, an engineering student who went on to work for the family firm, the C.E. John construction and development business. “We were very different. He seemed to balance things,” she said. “He has that other side of the brain that works with numbers.”

After college, the couple moved to Jerry’s hometown, Vancouver, and John got busy raising four children, studying art and working in her new studio, which is attached to the couple’s home on a cul-de-sac, right alongside the Cougar Creek greenbelt.

“We have loved living here for 40 years,” she said. “I am totally inspired by the nature of things.”

Bird envy

She may have found the vague abstractions of stoned professors annoying, but John clearly absorbed something valuable from those heady days. Her creations lean toward the dark, shadowy and dreamlike, with muted colors that seem to glow from within. They’re somewhere between Salvador Dali’s landscapes of the mind and Rene Magritte’s absurd juxtapositions (like that green apple floating in front of the face of “The Son of Man”).

There’s always a “psychic grounding” underlying John’s images, she wrote in an artist’s statement about her current show. Her people, creatures and objects inhabit symbolic, meticulous, deeper-than-real spaces. A contemporary Eve — with an apple, of course — is a frequent subject, because John has been a hard-core feminist since the day she boldly showed her rabbit drawing at school, she said.

“We women get blamed for everything,” she said.

Birds are also frequent visitors to John’s paintings. She has “bird envy” and dreams of flying, she said. “They seem to find their way into my work. I love crows. I think they’re beautiful. They’re such survivors.”

Her works are found in many public and private collections and galleries, from PeaceHealth Southwest Washington Medical Center to the Portland Art Museum rental and sales gallery. If you’ve visited Vancouver’s Niche Wine Bar, you’ve seen at least one big John painting: Dominating the room is a Dali-esque landscape featuring some known local characters including Niche owner Leah Jackson and her son Stuart playing the bass. In the restroom, perhaps provided for inspiration, is a (somewhat discrete) painting of a guy peeing in the woods.

John’s works can seem serious and deep, but it’s not hard to find edges of humor in them. “My ideas are drawn from contemporary events where philosophies and religions often clash,” she said.

Inspiring

Raising four children always meant being engaged with the local community, John said. “I coached soccer, can you believe that?” she laughed. “But I always continued to paint, no matter what.”

She always engaged with the artistic community too, she said — teaching and sometimes even taking classes, just for the companionship and conversation. She’s done many projects for local charities. She was the curator of the North Bank cooperative studio and gallery in downtown Vancouver for three years.

“I love working around other artists,” she said. “It’s so much fun and so inspiring.”

Several years ago, John was instrumental in sparking the short-lived Vancouver Organization for Contemporary Art, an experimental gallery and performance space on the edge of downtown that hosted exhibits readings, dance recitals and edgy artistic happenings. This year, with the flagship North Bank gallery disappearing from Main Street after a 14-year run, John decided to devote some inheritance money and her family’s construction business to creating a replacement with a big difference.

While North Bank was a nonprofit collective that came to emphasize community and student exhibits, John’s sleek and spacious new Art at the Cave gallery — which she operates with fellow artists Kathi Rick and Cynthia Heise — means to raise the bar, exhibiting experimental works and notable Pacific Northwest artists.

That’s one way of putting Vancouver’s art scene on the map, John said. “We have a wonderful local following, but it’s hard to get collectors to go down there. They go to Portland,” she said.

Momentum

Now 70, John is experimenting with new techniques — like layering her paintings with newspaper collages related to the subject. A frequent one these days is our natural environment, which John depicts as fragile, complicated and profoundly affected by people.

Unfortunately, John said, her artistic momentum is slowing down. Her husband suffers from Parkinson’s disease, which takes up much of her time and energy, she said. Jerry John is the one who built her studio — and then rebuilt and expanded it after a tree crashed through the roof during a storm, she said.

But, she added, there’s really nothing new about art projects that don’t get done and sparks that never burst fully into flame. “We do that a lot, we artists,” she said. “We have too many ideas than we can ever finish.”

Then she started rolling a rust-red base layer onto a brand-new canvas.