John W. Golden, East Coast
Member Since January 2007
Artist Statement The recurring theme in John W. Golden's work is affection. While not always apparent in any particular piece of work, affection for something is usually the reason behind the images he creates.
Born in 1967, John Golden is the son of a watercolorist mother and a folksinger father. He loved to draw from an early age, and for that reason, his school work often suffered.
When John was 10 years old, his mother opened a gallery to show and sell her watercolors. John spent half of his afternoons in the back room of the gallery, building model buildings out of scrap matboard and the other half wandering the historic city around the gallery. Many historic but decrepit builidngs had recently been torn down, so the area was full of scrap materials, found relics and textures, and John developed a love for the unintentional design that exists in urban environments.
Shortly after the gallery opened John began to work in linoleum block printing, and sold his artwork in his mother's gallery. The sucess of those prints, and an interest in regional history led John to create a series of hand-tinted pen and ink reproductions of the North Carolina Lighthouses. He spent a major part of his teen years hand tinting lighthouses until his art took a different direction.
It all started with a crush. She was photo editor for the high school yearbook and needed photos of the homecoming parade. Lovestruck, John said he could take them. He was woefully mistaken. The pictures didn't come out, but a passion for photography was born.
John went to the mountains of North Carolina to earn degree in Graphic Design, and enrolled in every photography course the university offered. The beautiful surroundings offered a new subject matter for John: Design as it occurs in nature.
Near the end of John's college years, there was a new development in the graphic design field: the introduction of desktop computers. A summer job as Building Monitor in the art department afforded John access to the computer lab. He taught himself how to use the Apple Macintosh and the few programs that were available then, and then went out into the professional world of Graphic Design.
Through a series of jobs in corporate art departments, John developed his digital illustration skills along with his design skills. Low budgets often required John to be both the illustrator and designer on projects (this was the early 90s, mind you, and the two disciplines were not as mingled as they are today), and the mix allowed him to develop his illustration skills even further, as the speed at which projects began to move, and the disappearance of what was called lead time on most projects, required illustration that traditional methods were too slow and costly to produce.
A sideline in freelance illustration took John out of the in-house corporate world and into the world of broadcast design. He was given the opportunity to design, illustrate and animate on projects for clients like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. The labor intensive process and the high standards to which his work was held pushed John to develop his art even further, and also to strike out on his own.
The move into the freelance world also meant a move back to his hometown and his family's gallery. John needed a way to get his art out of the computer and into the hands of his patrons. Fortunately, archival printing from the desktop soon became available, and John was an early adopter of the growing process.
John now works in a space next door to the Golden Gallery, freelancing by day, and creating his digital illustration at night. Somehow, he manages to squeeze some digital photography in there as well. He is back to spending his afternoons in the places he loves.
Visit http://johnwgolden.com for more insight into John's work and for updates on new work.
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