John’s work has been exhibited at the San Diego Museum of Art;
the University of California, Irvine; MIT’s List Art Center; Harvard’s
Carpenter Center, and numerous other museums and galleries. He
has completed murals for the City Of Cambridge and the University
of Connecticut, Storrs; He has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo Arts Colonies and a National Endowment for the Arts, Regional Fellowship in Painting, as well as a Research Fellowship
in Drawing at Harvard. Teaching positions include Harvard, the Art
Institute of Boston, and the School of Museum of Fine Art.
He studied at the New York Studio, Marlboro College, and the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
John Devaney’s love of drawing the figure inspires his paintings of the human parade. His scenes of everyday life teem with an infinite variety of beings – both mythical and familiar, dark and comical.
His earliest work reflects a fascination with the figure underwater, a subject that has expanded beyond human swimmers to animals, mythological scenes, even an underwater operation, a submerged labyrinth, and a Zeus-like bull pursuing a glowing bagel.
The fluidity, distortions, and mystery of water translated into his subsequent cityscapes and landscapes, in which figures, architecture, the land, and sky all interact : the brick walks and cobblestones of a Nantucket street scene surge around the flow of pedestrians; the tourist hordes pour from a ferry landing at the wharf or through the canyons of midtown Manhattan.
