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CONNERSMITH is pleased to announce a new cycle of paintings by John Stark. This alluring series, titled “The Diver,” beckons us to venture into unknown, fantastical spaces. Stark expertly blends genres of Dutch Golden Age marine paintings, German Romantic landscapes, and modern action-adventure films, to create splendid vistas of remote shorelines and sea swept caverns.

Horizon, 2024, oil on panel, 12.20 x 16.14 inches.

Stark’s escapist visions bespeak his talent as a storyteller. Light and sea play central roles in enigmatic narratives, evoking different times of day and eliciting a spectrum of moods. The glowing dawn that silhouettes a shoreline in “Sailor’s Warning” recalls the ancient mariner’s rhyme: “red sky at morning, sailor take warning.” Soft hues of light tint the sky in “Day Swim” making a congenial atmosphere for a snorkeler and a reader on a distant, sandy beach. In “Horizon” a lone swimmer pauses to view a radiant sunset; “Night Swim” ominously features a diver swimming in the still of night beneath a full moon, and, in the emotionally chilling “Cold is the Night,” a shark’s fin pierces the dark water below a star strewn sky

The Blue Cave, 2024, oil on wood, 12.20 x 16.14 inches.

Figures in mysterious natural settings, submerged in water and minimized by cavernous rock formations, provoke us to imagine their intents and goals. Stark’s protagonists sometimes face hostile elements as they set off into the sea, clad only in diving masks, snorkels, and wet suit, or swim trunks. Within the icy recesses of “The Blue Cave,” the artist transfigures psychological tension into a gorgeous revelation of nature’s sublimity. Though his works allegorize personal isolation and wreckage, they also allude to treasure seeking and emotional discovery; and whereas they at moments are tinged with melancholia, the adventures they suggest are consistently thrilling.

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Cold is the Night (detail), oil on wood, 12.20 x 16.14 inches.

Filmic imagery in Stark’s pictures activates our popular collective memories of James Bond movies, Jaws, and vintage travel posters. His informed painting style resonates with art history, being conversant with the seventeenth-century moonlit seascapes of Aert van der Neer, sublime vistas of Caspar David Friedrich, muted skies of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, intimate figures of Gustave Courbet, and lustrous waves of Vija Celmins. “Green Cave,” distinguished by the absence of humans and other creatures, embodies the purity of the artist’s concept for this series, as it evokes ancient origins, shadows of Plato’s cave, and echoes of past lives. Here we may sense most keenly that, thematically, “The Diver” issues from a lineage of forgotten rituals performed in caves, where the art of painting first emerged.

- Jamie L. Smith, Ph.D.

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