John Modesitt Art

John Modesitt was born on November 6, 1955, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He became very serious about art at 12 years of age. He began painting in watercolors and moved on to acrylics when he was 17 years old. His formal training began in the late 1970s under Robert Frame at Santa Barbara City College, where Modesitt was introduced to oil painting. During this period, he also studied at Cabrillo College and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In 1980, he moved to New York City to study art more seriously. There, he studied privately at Townsend Studios. However, he was discouraged by the onslaught of the modern art movement and began studying on his own at museums in New York City and Chicago. In 1985, he moved to Chicago with his family, where he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. Most of his time there was spent in the museum studying the collections of his favorite painters including Monet, Manet, Pissarro and Renoir. There, he observed all he could from those artists. In the early 1990s, Modesitt moved his family back to Southern California where he could spend most of the year painting directly from nature. Galleries throughout the nation began representing him. He began to paint in Europe, where he lived part-time. Several exhibits assembled in Japan in the 1990s showcasing Modesitt's paintings. In 2012, Modesitt was chosen to represent the USA in an exhibit in the Great Hall in Beijing, China. After 1990, Modesitt predominately painted landscapes of the American West as well as figurative works. Numerous articles have been published in major art magazines about his work. He currently has paintings in TheButler Institute of American Art and the New Britain Museum of American Art. A recent book published highlights his California paintings entitled Modesitt: The Paintings of California. Modesitt currently lives with his family between two locations, San Diego, California and Santa Fe, New Mexico.