Jack Culley began this "Last Great American Landscape Series" while teaching at California State University San Bernardino and receiving a lot of encouragement and some pushing from his students and from teachers. John studied geology and geography at California State University Los Angeles and received a BA in geography. He then earned a BA in Art History and Art from CSUSB and later an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. With study backgrounds in the sciences, math, art history and fine art, John is committed to the task of putting it in all into is works.
Born in Texas, growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania and living in the SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA forever, John is now resigned to painting and trying to figure out how his wife Melissa and a zillion others get to have so much fun while seriously working in the field of ceramics.

I have produced works tailored for three categories, each then carried on as a series.

THE ALTARPIECE SERIES
These works are complex, mechanical and borrow an external element from the altarpiece, the frame, a heralding device.     The internal features, the picture, illustrate historically significant ideas or concepts.
The relative movement of elements in the picture form the defining aspects of the picture.

THE PERCEPTION SERIES
These works deal with those small deceptions that are brought about by mishaps associated with matters of perception. They are illustrative models. Some are mechanical, and in these, some elements move. Some depict the results of mechanical actions. With these works I hope to define a few of the tasks given to painting.

THE GREAT AMERICAN LANDSCAPE SERIES
These works are a little about the loss of "REAL LANDSCAPE", more about the increasing dominance of those flat images that are arriving into our field of vision, and even more about the mechanics of painting. In these works every process of their building shows up somewhere, processes that obtain, delete, define, enlarge, protect and repair, and in the end the effects of process upon process, upon process define the work, and the preliminary object remains exposed and the other object the painting shows up on top.