John Devaney

Anyone even thinking about taking a good look at a John Devaney painting should first pause and breathe deep. Ready yourself intellectually by thinking monumentally: Think double – No, triple! – banana split, oozing with excess.  Open your mind to  excesses.  Now apply that same exercise in provocative thought to investigating Devany’s layers of allusion, paradox and symbolism. Think pulpits and theatres and Sanford Farm vistas, August phosphorescence, disgorging ferries, New York’s mid-town caverns, Time Square’s cacophony Boston Brahmin and Quaker meetings….  Imagine the dynamics of it all – the inanimate animating the animate.  Metaphors.  Life masquerading as life.  Teeming.

John Devaney’s paintings orchestrate a human parade, moving; eternally moving through an ebb and flow of consciousness, abundant and sensory; emotively staged and perfectly illuminated against the tension that lives between symbolism and allusion, rock-solid (?) inanimate and the human condition.
~ Carolyn Walsh

John Devaney is a former Faculty member of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Boston; and the Carpenter Center, Harvard University.

Devaney is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship in Painting, Research and Teaching Fellowships at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, and artist residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell Artist Colonies.

His work has been exhibited at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, MIT List Visual Art Center, and the Lyman Allan Art Museum, the Newport Art Museum, the Brockton Triennial, the Danforth Museum of Art, Harvard University, a ten-year retrospective at Miami-Dade College, University of California at Irvine, and the Springfield Museum of Art.

Major mural commissions include the 2400 square foot painting for the University of Connecticut’s Natatorium and the Water Fountain of Danehy. ~ Excerpted from John Devaney website