John Fincher: In Memoriam
John Fincher has for more than 40 years created art that celebrates what the artist terms modestly "the trappings of the American West."
“John Fincher: In Memoriam” opens on Friday, October 25. This exhibition honors the life and legacy of renowned artist John Fincher (1941-2024), who passed away in August of this year. Fincher had exhibited his work at LewAllen and its predecessor, the Elaine Horwitch Galleries, at various times since the late 1970s. He was named by a well-known art writer as a member of the “Holy Trinity of Santa Fe Landscape Painters” that included fellow LewAllen artists Forrest Moses and Woody Gwyn and was one of the gallery’s most widely-collected artists.
A much beloved and masterful painter, monotype maker, and skilled draftsman, Fincher explored diverse and captivating subjects—from piñon-dotted landscapes and shaving brushes to prickly cactus and towering poplar trees. He often referred to these motifs as the “trappings of the West,” celebrating the vibrant essence of the American Southwest with a unique blend of humor, wit, and theatrical brilliance.
Fincher’s artistry was characterized by a strong commitment to capturing the beauty of his surroundings. He loved the land that he called home. His heroic paintings featured limbs thrusting from unseen trunks, cacti exploding to fill canvases, and botanicals floating through the sky, all rendered in rich colors that radiate the mythic spirit of the American Frontier.
Describing himself as a man of the West, Fincher's colorful close-ups of commonplace objects transformed the ordinary and found unexpected grace in the everyday. Dubbed “Cowboy Pop,” his works mirrored the cultural transfigurations of urban artists like Andy Warhol but with a decidedly unpretentious approach. “I never strive to be didactic,” Fincher said. “My paintings are all about the place where I live. I want to paint things people will find beautiful and enjoy living with.”
This exhibition honors Fincher’s ability to create uplifting, engaging works devoid of kitsch or cliché. His mastery of materiality, combined with his fluency in line, color, and light, converged to produce art with direct honesty. Fincher’s work is celebrated for its embrace of the purity and possibility for new beginnings, a hope that is inalterably paired in the mythic imagination with the pristine majesty that Fincher saw in his vision of the Southwest. Rich in sophisticated beauty and powerful meaning, Fincher’s work resonates with the iconic elements at the heart of America’s spirit.
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John Fincher
”Through his modernist approach, Fincher invents paintings with skillful handling and pictorial organization.”
— Donald J. Hagerty, Southwest Art
Paintings by John Fincher
Essays by James Moore, William Peterson, and Mira Pajes Merriman
Interview with the artist
$60
JOHN FINCHER has created art that celebrates what the artist terms modestly “the trappings of the American West.” These “trappings” encapsulate references that are both familiar and totemic of the Great American Frontier and its mythic role as a reservoir of pride, strength, individualism and renewal.
Fincher’s art explores diverse art historical and personal references to offer new understandings of America’s natural and cultural landscapes. His images of towering poplars, pine limbs set against crystalline skies, richly hued desert hillsides, the array of colors within canopies of aspens turning, and aggressively cropped prickly pears unravel the manifold cultural meanings inscribed within representations of the mythic American West. Elsewhere, as in an enigmatic painting of a lone padlock and a suite of serially repeated images of shaving brushes, the artist transmutes commonplace objects into powerful expressions that compound the equivocal with the intensely diaristic.
With essays by James Moore, William Peterson and Mila Pajes Merriman, as well as an extensive interview with the artist, this is the first comprehensive volume dedicated to John Fincher’s forty-year career.
Learn more and order your copy here