John Hathorn is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he taught painting and drawing from 1982 to 2019. He has been twice recognized by the University with Eminent Faculty Awards, as Distinguished Professor in 2008 and with the Ray P. Authement Excellence in Teaching Award in 2013. A native of Oxford, Mississippi, he received BA and M.Ed degrees from the University of Mississippi and the MFA in Painting from Florida State University. The artist has been represented by galleries in Houston and Dallas, Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana. He lives and works in Lafayette, Louisiana.
For four decades as a painter and constructivist, Hathorn’s work underscores a long- standing interest in literature and in particular relations between painting and poetry. Chronologically and stylistically diverse sources of art historical correspondence have served as important catalysts in his paintings which remain firmly grounded in abstraction and are informed by the duality of eastern and western traditions as well as the nearly three decades that he has periodically taught in England, France, and Italy. His work is often thematically categorized by titles including, Correspondences, Migratory Poems, The Baudelaire Sketches, On Rilke, Poems to Copernicus, The Grammar of Water, and Book of Hours among others.
The artist has described his studio practice as “addressing the intimacy of painting through oblique reference to internal and external experience, and through relational correspondences with writers and artists whose work continues to sustain me. The touch sensibility in the making and the physical palpability of materials I believe to be inseparable from the feeling and meaning of my painting.”
