Introducing John Hathorn

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 a Distinguished Professor and with the Ray P. Authement Excellence in Teaching Award. 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. His work resides in numerous private as well as in public collections. 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. Grounded in abstraction, his work is 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 art 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.”

Who makes up your art circle?

Having devoted almost four decades as an academic and longer still to my art practice, I have had the enormous benefit and privilege of working with scores of colleagues and hundreds of students who have had a profound impact on my life. These groups have served as an influential core in the development of my thinking and my art.

The individuals and sources that compose one’s circle can be as expansive or narrow as one chooses. I consider myself exceedingly fortunate to be living in a time where experiencing art in person is rarely limited by geography or, perhaps to a lesser degree, the modesty of financial means. Equally fortunate is our secondary experience of art, exponentially expanded through unprecedented access to the written word, wondrous cinematic imagery, and technological and scientific discovery that permits witness to the virtual reconstruction of Leonardo’s Last Supper and the telescopic lens that reveal the anatomy of spiral galaxies heretofore unimaginable. It is resources such as these that facilitate access to the dead as well as the living—or perhaps more accurately stated the past and the present alike—and thus entrance into the palpable and inexhaustible history of art through millennia.

While the list of artists and scholars who have influenced my work is long, modernist and contemporary alike, it has been those from earlier centuries that have quite often served as

conceptual catalysts in my work as a painter and constructivist. To this end I readily acknowledge the sustenance derived from the works of Fra Angelico, Vermeer, Rubens, Baudelaire, Rilke, and Woolf to mention but a few—artists and writers alike—whom I wholly consider, with enormous gratitude, to be among my circle.

How do you expand your art circle?

The question of how to expand one’s circle may be beneficially informed by posing additional questions which in turn stimulate a range of clarifying responses.

How do you devote time engaging the arts? Engaging the senses? Where have you travelled recently and did the journey(s) afford unexpected sensory rewards (or at the very least useful stimuli) — an exhibition, a play, a concert, a lecture, a performance, a sacred space, a friend’s studio, an ancient landscape, a forest, a century old flea market, a foreign country, a communal meal, solitude... How might any of these experiences find their way into your art? Into a communal conversation?

What are you reading? What inspirations, however modest, may have emerged from the lips of a poet, the novelist, a composer, the scientist, an environmentalist, a fictitious character who though perhaps deeply flawed is nevertheless morally courageous? What kinds of films are you drawn to and are they intellectually stimulating? Are they visually compelling? In what way are they edifying?

In my experience, artists thrive on correspondences that recognize and celebrate who we are as individuals and as a culture, that explore where we come from and how we experience the world, that examine how our individual aesthetic, while being uniquely personal, may also be universal in its capacity for connection. Everyone has a history which deserves the opportunity to be expressed and shared, to be a potential source of communion with someone else.

While responses to some of these questions may be enlightening toward the potential expansion of one’s art and their art circle, engaging in communal stimuli is quite often the easiest place to start including exhibition openings, performing arts events, membership in regional arts organizations, centers, and museums, and volunteer work in the aforementioned entities. Expanding one’s presence beyond their region often follows through the submission and inclusion in competitive exhibitions, in submitting grant applications through state arts agencies as well as private art and non-profit foundations along with research into regional as well as national artist residency opportunities all of which, while typically very competitive, are an excellent way to broaden geographical outreach. Getting one’s art out into the world and doing so in a sustained manner is a laborious process that requires discipline, perseverance, willingness to breach one’s comfort zone, and sometimes simply being at the right place at the right time. Above all it requires belief in one’s own abilities and in the integrity of their individual pursuits.

What value do you see in having a creative community?

Perhaps this inquiry runs parallel to accessing the value of being a member of a family. The importance of having a support system as an artist, like that of one’s family of origin, cannot be overstated. The benefits of communal support are manifested in myriad forms including artists mentoring artists, arts organizations providing diverse forms of guidance, opportunity, and resources that illuminate avenues for personal as well as collaborative development. Museums, contemporary art centers, galleries, and universities serve as the locus for interdisciplinary exchange vital to the expansion of ideas and the cultural diversity of a community, simultaneously stimulating economic support not only for the creative community but the community at large. The presence of the arts and humanities within any community is arguably one of the most telling aspects of its vitality and, by comparison, a measure of the vitality of its inhabitants.

How does your artistic approach contribute to your community?

The measure of any individual’s contributions may well be best determined by the recipients of those contributions. I have long felt that even the smallest act of encouragement may have an impact far greater than any of us imagine or, for that matter, may even be aware of. Parallel to this premise, I believe that we teach by example, and that our actions as creative individuals, typically evinced by the work we produce, possess a capacity of stewardship that may well exceed the weight of verbal inspiration. Having the sustained privilege of teaching in a university art department has undoubtedly provided me with a structural catalyst and voice enabling me to challenge emerging artists at critical stages of their development. Such a catalyst carries the duality of privilege and obligation alike. Making oneself accessible to others in a creative community and the means by which we celebrate the artistic accomplishments of others is, in and of itself, a fundamental form of sustenance.