Spheres of AbEx - Heather James Fine Art

JOHN GRILLO (b. 1917) was raised in the small industrial town ofLawrence, Massachusetts. The 1930’s brought the family to Hartford,Connecticut where as a child growing he watched his father paint andsculpt. John would frequent the Wadsworth Antheneum Museum inHartford where the collection of portraits would inspire him to becomea portrait painter. In 1935 he enrolled in the Hartford School of Fine Artswhere he learned portrait and landscape painting.In 1948, Grillo attented the New York school of Hans Hofmann and alsospent summers at Hofmann’s school in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Inthe 1950s, he experimented with symbolism and action painting and gridlikepaintings consisting of small squares based on Hofmann’s teachings.In the 1960s, Grillo’s paintings evolved into a series of oversize canvasesprimarily in a luminous yellow range that to the critics evoked the powerof light and sunshine. One artist called Grillo the Renoir of AbstractExpressionism, another compared him to Rubens for his sensuality. Onecritic brought up Turner, while another waxed eloquently about Venetianluminosity. Exhibitions of these works appeared at the Howard WiseGallery and the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, both in New York. In the 1970sGrillo continued geometric paintings, this time on a larger scale in aconstructivist manner. Before retiring from the University of Massachusettsin 1991, Grillo produced a large mural representing the agrarian andacademic elements in the history of the town of Amherst, presided overby the illustrious native poet, Emily Dickinson.