John McVicker graduated in 1974 with a degree in art from Webster College, Saint Louis, Missouri. After graduation he participated in several shows in Amherst and Boston, Massachusetts and in New York City. In 1976 he became an English language teacher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. He’s been a language teacher since that time, teaching at the Federal Institute, at the University of Kansas, and since 1985 at Ohio University. In recent years he has rediscovered painting and this past fall had his first individual exhibition.

I make pictures as a way of putting my eye, hand, mind, and heart in closer touch with the feelings of energy and peace, feelings of bliss I suppose, that fill me while I'm working. While painting, I try to discover the forms, colors, textures, and surfaces that seem to belong to the picture. Although more than half of my pictures are representational, these six are recent abstract paintings.