John Fitzsimmons was born in Central New York in 1953. His Father was a Merchant Marine Officer then an engineer in a steel mill, then a businessman in the plastics and packaging industries. His mother was a housewife. John grew up in on the edge of small-scale suburbia and spent his time in the fields and woods during the short summers and long and very cold winters. “my focus was science, I loved chemistry and assumed I would be some sort of scientist, I even wrote a letter to Glen Seaborg with a suggestion on how to separate isotopes with soap bubbles. Dr Seaborg wrote back a very nice long letter explaining that they already tried that idea, I have that letter somewhere”.

At an early age, Fitzsimmons started to progressively lose his hearing, which made school difficult. He took several years of lip reading and eventually was able to get hearing aids.

At 16 he moved with his family to Lockport NY, near Buffalo. Around this time he saw an exhibit of Charles Birchfield’s water colors at the Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute. “It seems that around the same time I saw the Birchfield show, I saw Frank Stella, Claus Oldenburg and Alexander Calder in Life Magazine and I think is when I decided to become an artist, it seemed like something I could do and an interesting life”.

He attended SUNY New Paltz for fine arts and remembers two great teachers. “I don’t think he liked me but I learned a great deal about design from Dale Stein, I remember his lessons about color, contrast, scale, pattern, and texture all the time”. His drawing teacher was Alexander Minewski who encouraged Fitzsimmons to apply to Cooper Union and the Art Academy of Cincinnati, two similar “studio schools”. He was accepted to the Cooper Union and thus a 100% 4 year scholarship but he would have had to start over, loosing his year at New Paltz. So he went to the Art Academy of Cincinnati where he thought they would take his first year, due to a mis understanding, they would not. “I loved Cincinnati, in the early 70’s the cultures were not yet homogenized, and I got a very solid education there”. During the summers he worked in a paper mill, a stamping plant, painting houses and building swimming pools.

After graduating from Cincinnati, he decided not to go to graduate school and instead hoped to get into the Whitney Museum Program, but was given first alternate, with the explanation that if he was in graduate school, they would of taken him.

Around that same time, his father bought a business in Utica NY and his first wife wanted to get married, “everything seemed to fall into place, I quickly had a job and a growing family”. He worked for his father for 13 years manufacturing products for Xerox and Kodak. After that he started his own business buying and selling surplus machine tools, he then went into free-lance product design, eventually settling into a project engineering position at Oneida Air Systems.

During all the years of work in the business world and taking care of a family, he continued to draw and paint when he could. “when I turned 50 I realized I was never going to be able to continue to do what I have been doing and somehow ever be able to seriously develop my art, so I decided that I had to do something different and give my art priority, and I eventually went broke doing so!”.

His art matured rapidly leading to many group shows and several solo shows. He had the great honor of being included in the Arts In Embassies program, sponsored by the US Department of State and initiated by President Kennedy with the intent of promoting US culture overseas.

He recently renewed his interest in printmaking and taught himself non-toxic electro-etching and built his own 30 inch etching press. “etching allows me to combine my drawing and painting. My etchings are sometimes as much mono-prints as edition prints, I am not particularly concerned with keeping the edition consistent. I love the deep smeary blacks that can be achieved”.

Fitzsimmons is currently concentrating on paintings and prints of single and groups of figures. “I see the figure as raw material, that I use to search for the painting that is there somewhere”.

He often says that his work is about the “non-verbal idea” but this quote “My interest lies in what cannot be told, in what seems unspeakable.” — Nicolas Africano any of my works are about conflicted dual nature, arguments with myself, right brain vs. left brain, inside vs. outside, aggressive vs. passive, pragmatism vs. ideals. All are “non-verbal ideas.”

“These non-verbal ideas may float in my head for months and eventually I work them into sketches or small paintings. I then make reference photographs or drawings from models and then work those images into more elaborate drawings. When I start the actual finished work, I have a strong visual idea of where I want it to end up. Changes tend to be reductive, where I remove elements and simplify form and color.

In Upstate New York I grew up with long and cold and dark winters. In part because of that, I like the hard, low winter light and heavy massed forms over which light has to fight its way around. Mostly working in oil, I incise and cross hatch to model forms, modify edges or add detail. Sometimes I work in color, sometimes value.

I look at a great many artists but these works most relate to Giotto, Bacon, Hopper, Eitel, Guston and Tooker. All these painters deal with the introspective figure in a delimited space.

My work avoids specific verbal narratives but invites non-verbal, open and ambiguous ones. Often I’m uncomfortable with the images in the finished paintings but do not want to reduce this tension; for me this is the core of the work.”