(light bright music) - The San Diego region is home to many artists who work in an assortment of media.

As a curator, an educator, I want to know what inspires these creatives.

This is "Insights Into Art."

(light bright music continues) (groovy music) On this episode of "Insights Into Art," I'm visiting with artist John Hogan at his studio in City Heights.

Hey, John.

- Hi, Alessandra.

How you doing?

- I'm good.

I'm good.

- Great.

Good seeing you.

- Yeah, good to see you too.

Right.

- All right.

Ready to go up?

- Yeah.

(soles squeaking) - All right, here we go.

- No seatbelt?

No.

- No seatbelt.

Maybe feet belt.

(Alessandra laughing) - Okay.

(elevator thunking) (elevator humming) Ooh.

(elevator thunking) (soles squeaking) (both laughing) Here we go.

(doors clanking and thunking) (groovy music continues) - All right.

Welcome to my studio.

- Ooh, wow.

Very cool.

- Thank you very much.

- You are busy.

John combines photography and painting to produce surreal otherworldly images.

- The foundation of my work is exploring my experience in landscape and sort of witnessing other people's experience.

And so, everything's sort of rooted in that.

I- - Do you grow up going out into the wilderness a lot or?

- Ah, yeah.

I had... Let's put it this way.

I had some formational experiences in the landscape and some were very, very beautiful and some were very not so beautiful.

- Uh-huh.

- And so, you know, that sort of memories from my youth provides, like, the energy for creating work that has to deal with that.

And like a lot of artists, you know, some of it is dealing with trauma, some of it is dealing with family relationships that were maybe never resolved.

Some of it was, like, the beauty of being out there, solitude and contemplation.

I think it's, you know, being out in quiet wilderness, which is what I seek out.

It's the only place I feel really, really comfortable.

- [Alessandra] Uh-huh.

- In the very beginning, I started as kind of doing what I would call straight photography, the classic lug a big camera out into the wilderness.

And I've always been interested in the way we use land and my first major body of work, which I started in, like, 2002 and it sort of continued on through the end of the aughts, was looking at constructions in the landscape that the humans had created for themselves to sort of enjoy the outdoors, (groovy music continues) make things nice for being out there, picnic benches, the parking lots that go with it, viewpoints from the national park.

And so, photography was my base.

And then in about 2010, (groovy music continues) periodically, I need a major change in my life and in my art life.

And so, I sort of just abandoned the straight photography.

Part of the reason was, you know, the ubiquity of photography with the advent of, back then it was Facebook and then Instagram sort of online... - World.

- Yeah, constant photography.

So, I wanted to sort of transition into something else and, you know, I'd always wanted to do painting and I started kind of, like, "Well, maybe I can mix painting with the photography."

And so, I ended up, I took a couple years off to think about it.

And in about 2012, I sort of started messing around with painting on photographs that I made.

And so there's a whole body of work of my looking at people, the physical form, a human form in landscapes.

And oftentimes, they are sort of contemplating the landscape or posing in a more formal way after they've made it to this beautiful place.

And some of the work is sort of, I guess, I'm sort of like sneaking peeks at people while they look at the landscape and I would like to show you one of those now.

- Yeah.

Okay.

Let's check that out.

- So, this piece is called "Valley of the Moon," and this is one of the last pieces I did of this photography mixed with painting on top of it.

Coming from when I was a little kid, my dad was a race car guy and we would go to the car races and the shows and that kind of stuff.

And there were all these beautiful colors.

And I would take photographs, instead of the car racing, I would take photographs really close up of the color.

So I've always been really affected by color, so I decided to go ahead and continue kind of push the sort of boundaries of color with this work.

The human body is such a recognizable form that when, you know, flattened to a silhouette, you still can see, in some ways, that it sort of amplifies people's posture and the nature of their body, and I thought that was really interesting.

So, those were kind of the sort of basis for these works.

- [Alessandra] After describing his work, I wanted to see how he creates the silhouettes on his photographs, so John demonstrated his meticulous process.

- I'm embellishing these figures using... You know, I've always been interested in bright colors and the car racing stuff that my father would take me to these events, and glitter and pearl and all that kind of stuff.

So, I developed this technique where essentially I paint over these figures.

So, it's kind of like a complex coloring book.

(groovy music continues) - I don't want to do that.

So this is a piece that got messed up, so I just cut it out and I, well, we can use it for this demonstration.

And the way that I do this generally is I'll put down a couple barrier coats before I start putting on layers of medium with glitter.

And this is just an acrylic medium that a lot of artists would use.

It's clear and I'll mix the glitter with it.

And so for this process, I would begin with a little bit of this material here, and then I use these fine brushes and you got to kind of work fast.

I have this physician's examination lab that has a good magnification.

So, essentially what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint in this thing, to be very, very careful to get it around the edges.

And as you can see, that guy's fingers probably should take like a, probably take a little bit more of a small brush, but let's see how I can pull it off.

I haven't done this one in a long time.

(groovy music continues) - [Alessandra] And so, there's a lot of work that goes in.

Well, first going out to take the image.

- [John] Mm-hm.

- I'm just thinking of all the hours that go into this piece.

- Yeah, this- - You know, - Yeah.

- going out there, - Yeah.

- going into the strips to take the images to capture the scenes and these characters, and then the process that you do, (groovy music continues) you know, with the software to like bring the images in.

- Yeah.

- But then, you also want to do this other very tactile and kind of, you know, also intricate work - Yeah.

- with the painting of the silhouettes with the glitter.

- Exactly, yeah.

There's so many processes in this.

(groovy music continues) Ultimately, what I end up doing is once I get this layer down and it dries, I come back and I do it again and again until you get this sort of real dimensionality to the work, to the finished product.

I'll know when I'm finished when it's impossible to keep the medium from, like, pouring over the edges of the figure.

Part of it is like an exploration and sort of discovery, right?

You don't even know what you want to do until you did it and you go, that looks cool.

- [Alessandra] It's been enlightening seeing such a precise and exacting artist share so much of his process.

Thank you, John.

(groovy music continues)