John P Korb

As a child in Palo Alto, California, I began dragging home books from the public library, and copying "old master" drawings on my little kiddy black board. (Oddly enough my drawing still reflects this, often working from light to dark on a neutral ground.) At the advice of a friend of the family I was packed off to my first formal "lessons" at a local artist's league. As an impressionable little kid it was pseudo-Gothic: to be ushered down a gloomy hallway, where I was sat on a stool in front of an easel, and then abandoned. Periodically some woman would goose-step into the room and, in a reprimanding tone, tell me to "Paint!" With minor exceptions I've had little use for art instructors ever since. The thing I largely retained was an impression of walking into a kind of church, or holy place, with the permeating odor of linseed oil and pastels.

I attended Ringling School of Art (R.S.A.D.) during three different later periods. Instructors at this institution were always practicing professional artists, and I learned more from studying these people as individuals than from any curriculum (notably Robert Osborn, M.A., a master craftsman painter cut from the cloth of Jan van Eyck, and Robert Little, an old school illustrator of the Norman Rockwell era, who himself had studied under John Sloan). I was a dedicated student with honors standing. It was more indicative of "Ring-a-ling's" own internal growing pains that, when I began experimenting with Fine Art applications of CGI in the late 1980s, it was strongly impressed upon me verbally that I might be happier somewhere else! I have always looked upon this as a special kind of diploma, going on to complete my Associate of Arts degree at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida.

At times I still have aspirations to be an art teacher myself (especially given I've had so many awful ones); and I offer private tutoring and mentoring when occasions permit, if only to debunk some of the overwhelming myths and misperception.


Unexpected Influences


Perhaps because I've never been an outstanding one, I have always appreciated the work of photographic artists, notably Graciela Iturbide, and Jan Saudek. I also have an unexplained affinity for the Epiphyllum oxypetalum cactus, which I've been breeding for 2 or 3 decades, and also got me interested in the work of Luther Burbank and horticulture in general. Artistically, William Schaaf was one of my very first friends and mentors.

I volunteer with The Gestalt Center of Gainesville, Inc., a not-for-profit 501(c)3 grassroots educational organization, as a Gestalt Therapy trainer, where I designed, illustrated and conceptualized, as an internet application, a primer on Gestalt Therapy Theory. I'm also co-author of a book, iContact: The Gestalt Guide to Skilled Communication, (Gestalt Journal Press, 2007) with Davenport, Korb, and Martin. My roots with Gestalt therapy go back more than 30 years, before the inception of a "Center" or "Olecranon", when its influences invaded my home in a tangible way. Eventually I found my 'home' and 'center' in Gestalt, for my own individual reasons.

I am still somewhat active with the Tench Artists Studios and Figure Drawing Group in downtown Gainesville, Florida, where I previously leased a studio in the company of artists, Charlie Williams, Walker Watson, Bob Freeman, Daniel Stepp, Anne Gilroy and Lennie Kesl. With others (notably the extraordinary, independent efforts of Gerard Bencen [who originated GAWK] and artist Marie Hammer), we kept "Art Walk" alive and walking even when the City for whatever reason had walked away from it.


Past Affiliations

Florida Media Arts Center, Alachua County, Florida
Sonoma County Cultural Arts Council, Santa Rosa, California
Sonoma County Artist's Registry, Santa Rosa, California
Mill Gallery Cooperative, Petaluma, California
Sonoma State Figure Group, Sonoma, California
Gainesville Fine Arts Association, Alachua County, Florida


Works in Private Collections

. . . in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and California.

One final anecdote I share for the hellovitt. When I turned 14, on my 14th birthday, my father gave me a present. My father was a gifted musician, who after navigating 50 missions in a B-52 on the Nazis, drove a taxicab in San Francisco and eventually became a high school guidance counselor. A pretty thankless occupation. His line of the family goes back to a group of German gypsy vagabond outcasts who migrated to Russia as refugees under Catherine the Great. "Korb" means basket; so they were either basket weavers or fruit loops. My mother's side of the family has been traced to the French artist, Henri Rousseau, who Picasso liked, but most of his contemporaries considered a joke and sniggered behind his back. I can identify with both of these branches.

My father's idea of a birthday present was a brand new shirt and tie, laid out, almost funereally in a box. It was almost as if to say, "I gave up my life as an artist [musician] in order to pay for the shoes on your feet," and it has haunted me to this day. True, historically artists are generally considered society's 2nd class citizens. Art is the first curriculum to be cut in our schools. No parent ever says, "I want you to become an artist, like your old man." Art is a blue-collar, sweaty job. Most of it is carpentry, craft and labor and carcinogens. Artists themselves are like society's female: held up on a pedestal of reverence and adoration on the one hand, and exploited and ridiculed or brutalized on the other.

Most artists I know walk a fine line. It is our role to hold up a mirror that, sometimes, people don't like to see. As Fellini suggested, we are the "bad boys," the radicals, the chance-takers; and in thinking outside the box, providing a safety-valve to social sanity and evolution to human vision. But artists also love to be loved. Going "too far" creates alienation, mistrust. People like conventionality and comfort, and don't like to be challenged very much. When art ceased to be the puppet of historical doctrine, life became much less simple. Nazis simply burned it.
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In that sense my father's present was a failure: it's too much of a stretch for a boy of 14 to have to figure all of this out on his own. A job, any job, is only "performance art" anyway (which any career counselor will tell you), and no matter what choices you make, there are always concessions and sacrifices … and pay-offs. However, it is a valuable lesson in time to be able to walk in another man's shoes.

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