In Memoriam: John W. Carlson

In Memoriam: John W. Carlson

                                                             by Tom Wachunas

  “I want to show definitions by gesture, slant and color that might be seen and held in small or large hands, feelings, emotions, pains, anguish, anger, love, pleasures, and irregularities, battles and tranquilities.

 I want to paint Pure Forms knowing I will never succeed at it, — you need a godliness for that — to consider Silence and Emptiness as they were at that very moment before the Big Bang — can you even imagine it? — waiting there trembling, and then intervals of violence and peace, as in a man’s history.

 But most of all I want to show — Simplicity — a man, one at a time, himself rubbed into his body by gesture, slant and color, if that be possible.” - from John’s beautiful website, at

 https://www.johnwcarlsonstudio.com/  

 My very recent Facebook surfing (where I found the above photos) has brought me to tears. The outpouring of response to the sudden passing of artist John W. Carlson is both utterly heartrending and inspiring. 

 We weren’t “close personal friends” in the way most people understand such relationships to be. And yet, and yet… During and ever since my first meeting with the man - at the opening of his 2017 solo exhibit at Massillon Museum’s Studio M – I felt as if we were true old friends picking up where we’d left off from a previous conversation. He simply had that enlivening way about him…genuinely open, approachable and grateful, generous with his time, and sincerely interested in and encouraging of my own journey as a writer and maker of art. That meeting remains, like his art, unforgettable. Here’s a link to my 2017 review of that first encounter:

 http://artwach.blogspot.com/2017/05/bilingual-utterances.html  

 Thank you, John W. Carlson, for the bountiful giving of your creative passion, the affirmative power of your articulated aliveness. You will always be present to me and the innumerable artists whose lives you touched. And may we all continue to be moved to join ourselves, indeed to “rub” ourselves, into the body of this world - in all its smallness and enormity, in all its fragility and vitality. Thank you, John W. Carlson, for showing us how through art, such “gesture, slant and color” is not only possible, but necessary.