John Ochs

Gallery Affiliations: Jan Weiner Fine Art Consultant

Region: Midwest

Three things motivate and shape my work: pure pleasure, challenge, and the engagement in a visual and critical dialogue with other painters, past and present. The pure pleasure I derive from painting is just that: complete and utter expressive gratification, akin to faith in its steadfastness. The challenge comes in many forms, particularly in not knowing exactly where a work is going to go.

The dialogue is the response and physical reaction from my intuition, found in the work itself, both ordinary and esthetic. Clement Greenberg clarifies this distinction in his essay Intuition and The Esthetic Experience: "The intuition that gives you the color of the sky turns into an esthetic intuition when it stops telling you what the weather is like and becomes purely an experience of the color."