John
Kaine
Click here for a list of John's exhibitions
455
Newton Ave. #9, Oakland, CA 94606
510-836-2629·jckaine@sbcglobal.net
Painter John Chester Kaine recently returned to the “left coast” after nine years in New Orleans, where he had several solo exhibitions. John was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1962, and his family soon moved to Dublin, California, where he and his twin brother grew up on the eastern edge of the Bay Area. In the early 1980s, San Francisco’s vibrant gay community drew the artist to the City, where for the next decade he worked as a bike messenger.
John moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1994, a year that proved decisive in the painter’s development. Elements of Mexican culture became an integral component of his art, a tendency reinforced by his many return trips south of the border, including a five-month stay in 2006 in Oaxaca, where he is building a home. In John’s paintings, the bright pastels of Mexican neighborhoods, the dramatic flourishes of Mexican Catholicism, the dark quirkiness of Frida Kahlo, and the kitsch of Mexican popular culture are transformed through their encounter with the artist’s world of North American music, dance, film, Disney, and pop art.
John studied with painter Don Thompson, a protégé of Wayne Thiebaud, in Santa Cruz California, in 1996, although he is primarily a self-taught artist. Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf are among the artists who have most influenced what Mexican art critic Andres de Luna has called John’s “sui generis,” syncretistic work.