John Poon | Becoming an Artist

Utah landscape painter John Poon views his career as a continuing process of learning and evolving

By Norman Kolpas

Approaching his 50th birthday this August, John Poon can be judged by any standard to have established himself as a fine artist of substantial accomplishment. A graduate of the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, he’s taught there and at popular workshops nationwide. His landscape canvases sell in respected galleries from California to Wyoming and New Mexico to North Carolina. He’s lost count of the Best of Show and other awards and honors his works have received at annual events like Arts for the Parks, the Society of Western Artists, and numerous plein-air gatherings.

Talk to the modest and articulate Poon for even a few minutes, though, and you quickly realize that he doesn’t think of himself as having arrived as an artist. While the youngest of his six children, who range from 3 to 14 years old, plays in the background on a typical springtime morning in the Utah home he and his wife Jenny have made, Poon speaks of his career more as an endless process of becoming an artist.

“Painting is a fickle thing,” he says. “It’s elusive. Your eye is always ahead of your ability. You’re always trying to paint something you see in your mind’s eye. That keeps you reaching and, you hope, improving as a painter. You learn to enjoy the process.”

Indeed, Poon has been enjoying the artistic process for as long as he can remember. Growing up in San Francisco with an interior-designer father and a poet mother, he says, “I always had a love for the arts. I was always drawing. When I was 9, my mom bought me a watercolor set, and I’d spend whole afternoons painting with them. At school, I hung out in the art room all the time.”

But Poon hadn’t firmly settled on an art career by the time he graduated from El Cerrito High. Instead, one day he saw a recruitment poster for the Coast Guard and enlisted for a four-year stint. “That time made me realize that I probably wanted to figure out a plan,” he says. “When I got out, I was 23 and ready to buckle down to my studies.”

Poon enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, concentrating on graphic design and typography. “I was on the way to becoming an illustrator,” he says. Three classes away from graduating, he took a summer job illustrating for a design company and found himself “learning more on the job than I did in art school.” So he stayed on at the firm instead of completing his studies.

Several years later, however, Poon decided he did want a degree. At the suggestion of some friends, he enrolled in an illustration class at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. “It was fabulous, and I got hooked,” he declares. Despite the fact that he needed two more years of course work to complete the requirements there for a bachelor of fine arts, he decided to go for it.

Poon’s convictions grew even stronger with each new class he took and each new connection he made with academy faculty, all working professionals themselves who emphasized sound, studio-based academic fundamentals. That kind of training, he says, “gave me more tools with which to express myself, basic principles like values, shapes, proportions, perspective. With that as a foundation, you can create your own shorthand as an artist.”

Under the particular influence of academy mentors Bill Maughan and Craig Nelson, Poon developed passions for studio drawing and landscape painting. “I’d never pinpointed my focus until I met those two guys,” he recalls. “This was what I really liked doing.” A decade out of the service, he finally earned his degree and determined to become a full-time painter.

His transition to working artist was eased because, as an award-winning graduate, the academy asked him to stay on as a painting and drawing instructor. Eventually, he became the school’s Director of Foundations, overseeing all drawing, color, and design classes for entering freshmen.

Meanwhile, Poon’s reputation as a collectible artist began to grow. “I just kept developing my craft and sending paintings off to shows,” he says. “I started getting some accepted. You win a couple of awards, those build your confidence, and the accolades tell you that you’re on the right track. There’s something to be said for just being conscious about your craft and, as you develop as a painter, doors open up for you.” A decade ago, “it began to reach a point of critical mass,” he says with a chuckle. “Your career sneaks up on you.”

His career undeniably having arrived, about nine years ago Poon and his wife moved their family from the Bay Area to Jackson Hole, WY. Poon purchased the former home and studio of his friend and fellow landscape painter Scott Christensen. The new setting brought him a wealth of fresh Rocky Mountain subject matter. But after five years, the town began to feel a bit too remote and the winters far too cold. So four years ago, they settled in Liberty, UT, an hour’s drive north of Salt Lake City and just 20 minutes from Jenny’s parents. “And the added benefit,” says Poon, “is it’s just gorgeous, with a ton of stuff to paint.”

That doesn’t mean, though, that you’ll always find him painting out in the wilderness. Poon is as likely to record the vistas with a camera as he is with paint. Plein-air painting, he says, “is a means to an end in my view. I love doing it because, if you don’t, it’s really hard to understand the naturalistic color of what you’re painting. And painting light and shadow patterns that might change every five minutes across a land mass helps you distill information because you can’t get everything into a painting that quickly. In the end, it’s all about trying to become a better painter, and I see plein air as a means toward that end.”

Ultimately, however, he finds equal satisfaction in creating paintings in the studio based on those on-the-scene sketches or photo prints. “I love being able to do larger pieces on which you can spend more time working on design issues. I’m more concerned with how the results look than with where you were when you finished the painting.”

Judging by some of Poon’s most recent paintings, that approach of combining on-site experience and in-studio technique is yielding excellent results. Take, for example, GREEN ACRES, a 24-by-36-inch canvas depicting a sheep farm he passed en route home from teaching a workshop in Spring City, UT.

Shuffling through his photos recently, Poon happened on the scene and decided to paint it. In his home studio, he first worked out the composition with some small pencil sketches and color comps. Then, using a tiny red dot of paint at the canvas’s precise center as a reference point, he transferred the sketch in quick burnt-sienna strokes with a small, round sable brush. Next, he laid down a light ochre background tone across the entire canvas and “went right to it,” blocking in all the major elements before finally “adjusting the shades and values and hitting my accents” in brush strokes that capture his subjects accurately while also reveling in the expressiveness of his medium—a style Poon sums up as “painterly realism.” That swift, sure approach belies the fact that this particular work took him three full days to complete. “The painting started out with a huge sheep in the foreground,” he explains. “And I couldn’t get my eye past it.”

Eventually, as he relishes doing in the studio, Poon worked out the design, eliminating that imposing sheep and replacing it with the stretch of sun-streaked meadow that now directs the viewer’s eye back to the trees, rusty-roofed farm buildings, and mountains beyond. The painting epitomizes a sureness of vision and technique Poon deserves to be proud of. And he merits kudos all the more so for the fact that he accomplished this and other recent works in the face of adversity.

Over the past ten years or so, Poon had been steadily developing an allergy to the petroleum distillates in oil paints, long his medium of choice. Last September, while teaching a workshop in New Mexico, the allergy became so bad, with severe respiratory problems and almost insurmountable malaise, that he could barely get through the class.

His only choice was to change his medium, so Poon switched from oils to acrylics. “I’ve had to make a few adjustments to my process, to work around the medium a bit,” he says, “but the change has come pretty smoothly. Today, they make better, archival-quality acrylics. You can build up textures with them. To tell you the truth, I love them. I feel real joy working with acrylics now. Your eye for design, composition, values, doesn’t change. Everyone says my acrylics look just like my oil paintings.”

Rather than allowing the allergy to feel at all like a setback, Poon has viewed that challenge as yet another fresh opportunity for him to keep on becoming a better artist. “You learn to enjoy the process,” he explains. “I do resist falling back on the tried and true. If I ever find myself feeling too safe, I’ll try to stretch myself.”

With that same goal in mind, Poon intends to continue teaching four or five workshops a year. “I learn so much from that,” he says. “It’s inspiring and motivating to me.” He also anticipates evolving his works in new directions. “I’m really intrigued by shape, and there may be a strong shift over the next ten years for my landscapes to look more abstract.”

In the end, he says, “You just kind of follow your nose.” And he’s certain he’ll rest easy with wherever his instincts lead him. “You paint long enough,” he says, “and it humbles you.”

Representation
Evergreen Fine Art, Evergreen, CO; Fairmont Gallery, Sonoma, CA; The Garden Gallery, Half Moon Bay, CA; Legacy Gallery, Jackson, WY; Rowe Gallery, Sedona, AZ; Tomales Fine Art, Tomales, CA; Walls Fine Art Gallery, Wilmington, NC; www.johnpoon.com.

Featured in June 2011.