Biography
b. Providence, RI
John Paul McCaughey is an artist, educator, and community leader specializing in printmaking, painting and collage. He received his BFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island College and an MFA from The Ohio State University in 2012. He has held several academic positions around the country and has led the printmaking departments at both the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, AR and Wayne State College in Wayne, NE. John Paul has exhibited his work both nationally, in cities such as Boston, Detroit, and Chicago, as well as Internationally in Spain and France. He has also attended residencies at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, the Lawrence Arts Center, in Lawrence, Kansas and trained at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In 2019, John Paul acquired sponsorship from Speedball Artist Supplies, a partnership that keeps him busy performing demonstrations and workshops in the New England area and he also currently serves as Steering Committee Chair for the SGCI 2024 national printmaking conference being held in his hometown of Providence, RI. He recently resettled in Rhode Island and now teaches printmaking, drawing and design at Rhode Island College and CCRI.
Artist Statement
In my work, I draw inspiration from the distressed buildings and defaced walls of the inner city. I am attracted to these structures for their visual and textural properties, the cracks, chipping paint, poorly removed graffiti, overgrowth, and flashy advertisements. I love how cities age, how they evolve… embracing their past while also looking to their future. It is a parallel to how I develop work in the studio. I enjoy recreating the ephemeral qualities of these spaces through acts of painting, sanding, screen-printing, collage’ and decollage’. These processes combine to produce a mass of colorful and texturally diverse materials that I can quickly layer into my compositions. I juxtapose the results against more modern, digitally produced information as well as feed the in-progress work into photoshop to tinker with saturation, pixilation, and other digital effects. The entire process is a formal exploration of color, texture, space, and time. These works are abstracted portraits of the world I inhabit and the nostalgic value I place upon it.