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.