John August Swanson

John August Swanson was a native California artist, born in 1938 in the city of El Monte in Los Angeles County to immigrant parents. His Mexican mother, Magdelena Velasquez, had lived close to the Tarahumara Indians of Chihuahua; and his father, John August Swanson, Sr., came from Sweden, looking for new opportunities. John came to art later in life, when he was 30 years old. One fateful day, in the late 1960s, as he was walking in Hollywood, he was called into the studio of Sister Corita Kent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary religious community. She needed help to move some screen prints to drying racks, and he would tell people that this was when he first learned how to handle paper. The IHM ran a girls' high school and women's college, but he would learn from a friend, Lita Clear-Sky, of Sr. Corita's weekend, gender integrated, typography class, which he attended. Sr. Corita's weekend class gave him a new direction for his life. The quotes she used from Albert Camus and Buckminster Fuller, and her use of periodicals of the day in juxtaposition with bright colors and patterns in her art, revealed to him a connection between spiritual life and social justice. Following her class, he printed posters and signs to protest with the United Farm Workers, and he started to sell small crayon graffito paintings at local art fairs. From the early to mid-1970s, he began printing some of his early serigraphs in his home studio. Though Sr. Corita was a well-known art printer, she was not the one to teach him screen printing. In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, he went to England, where he learned and printed artworks at Advanced Graphics in London with Christopher Betambeau. In the 1990s, he was back in America and was printing with master printer, James Butterfield II, at Aurora Serigraphic Studio in Van Nuys. It was at this time that he could really begin to experiment and try many different options when printing his artwork. Instead of using water-based pigments and Pantone color sets to print his serigraphs, he would mix and thin oil and acrylic paints with lacquer to print his own unique and vibrant colors. Mr. Butterfield passed away in 2011, and Aurora Serigraphic Studio closed. In his final decade of creating artwork, he turned to giclée art printing. He never liked the idea of just bringing in a painting and having it color matched and reproduced. For him, every time an artwork was printed, it was an opportunity to try something new. It was a time for the artwork to grow, change and evolve. He began working on the digital scans of his artwork with Christopher Romano at the John August Swanson Studio, and then sending the new images out for proofing to Kolibri Art Studio in Torrance. The images he created speak for him, and of his love for all people.