John Register
From the early 1970s until his untimely death in 1996, John Register produced a unique body of work that expressed with remarkable clarity the sense of isolation and alienation so pervasive in American life during the late twentieth century. His paintings of vacant hotel lobbies, empty diners, silent parking lots and lonesome highways are often compared to Edward Hopper’s work. However, while Hopper frequently depicted isolated figures, Registers paintings, devoid for the most part of human presence, deflect a sense or isolation, or loneliness outwards, toward the viewer. Register is also sometimes considered a photo-realist. His work, however, while influenced by photorealism, has little to do with the slavish attention to detail and the distortions of the camera’s lens. In fact, Register’s paintings, which derive their power from his intense distillation of mood and emotion, are based on the elimination of detail. His images are drawn from snapshots taken while Register wandered the streets of Los Angeles and cruised the backroads of Southern California’s deserts and beaches. During the process of drawing and painting from these photographs, Register stripped away all details that he considered superfluous, paring his images down to their essential elements. By manipulating these elements, the basic geometry and color relationships of the snapshots, Register moved away from mere reproductions of his photographs toward the creation of inventive images imbued with memorable feeling and a luscious, painterly touch.
In 1990, Magnolia was pleased to work with Register in creating two editions of lithographs as well as a series of etchings which paired the spontaneity and delicacy of Register’s draftsmanship with the rich range of line and tone characteristic of intaglio printing. Since his death, Register’s work has been the subject of a major traveling retrospective that opened at the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, in 1999. His work is included in the collections of the Deutsches Postmuseum, Frankfurt, Germany; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; the Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY; the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA.
© Magnolia Editions
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