John Copeland received his BFA from California College of Arts and Craft in 1998. In Copeland’s hands, mortality, physicality, and a past that seems to be shadowing us take form in a manner that is fluid, fleeting, and at the same time, meaty, undeniably present. His liquid style and muted palette create a contradictory sense of reality and irreality within each canvas. In his dark, expressionistic “Your eyes are so peaceful, but your hands want more” tells a tale of violence or perhaps intimacy, in which a figure kneels over a prone person. Copeland heightens the narrative ambiguity with his technique: Faces are undefined; the sky is operatically smeared in blue, black, and white.”
