John Wallace

From a 2007 review by Ed McCormack in Gallery & Studio Magazine: John Wallace “brings to visual art a narrative gift so richly novelistic that one can't help pondering the possible meanings of his compositions any more than ignore all the subtextual implications in a complex prose passage by Nabokov or Updike. Indeed, Wallace is one of our more intriguing post-modern storytellers, employing a variety of dramatic devices, from allegorical enjambments akin to Beckmann (who inspired him, as a student, to become an artist), to the fiery colors of the Fauves, to the homegrown romanticism of the American regionalists.

That these obsessions make the artist a perennial outsider, even among his loved ones, is nowhere more evident than in "Approaching Storm, Creve Coeur," in which a young man stands in the shadow of a large tree at the foot of a hill, leading up to a Hopper-esque house. No painting in recent memory better personifies the paradox of the artist, as a figure at once entranced by and poignantly exiled from the simple pleasures of everyday reality.”