~ Where Tradition Meets Innovation ~
~ Where Tradition Meets Innovation ~
John Lear was an active Philadelphia painter for over seventy years. A Philadelphia native, Lear was born in 1910 and passed away in 2008. His life as an artist was comprised of working as a free-lance illustrator, teaching, and creating paintings and drawings for exhibition. His works include drawings, watercolors and oils. He had many solo shows in and around Philadelphia as well as several in New Jersey, a couple in New York City, and one in Wilmington, Delaware. His works are in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Detroit Museum, The Reading Museum, The Gulf Coast Museum in Clearwater, Florida, and the Woodmere Museum as well as in the private collection of numerous collectors in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Lear remarked about his work, 'My landscapes are largely Great Britain—records of what my eyes have seen and my mind remembered. He classified his work into two categories: 'records' and 'creations'—'records' being images, mostly landscapes, which he believes can be found in nature and recorded by the camera, and 'creations' being figurative works following World War II that combine realistic yet disparate images in dream-like landscapes.
