John Register, one of his generatio's most distinctive realist painters, painted surreally still predestined resolution, a mortal moment trapped on canvas, realist visions of faith and fear in equal proportions. Recurring, hauntingly seductive imagery characterizing John Register's paintings - stark interiors of diners, waiting rooms and bus depots, empty chairs in old hotel lobbies and vacant, mundane offices, environs of Los Angeles and desert landscape, New York and urban streetscape, and suburbs. People are rare in his pictures. Above all else Register's paintings, permeated with pristine light and rich colors, reveal unerring recognition of existential essences of everyday scenes. Often compared with Edward Hopper, Register said, "Hopper paints someone else's isolation. In my pictures you're the isolated one."
Register's use of his own photographs as a source of imagery and composition allowed him to evoke the essence of ordinary objects and anonymous places. He visited these places on car and train trips around the country most of his life. His compositions were often derived from or enhanced by photocopies of photos reducing them to bold, simplified shapes of dark and light. Often Register eliminated larger details such as barber stools, wall coverings, cars, people. Summing up this reductive approach he said, "Painting is less rendering and more distillation. Every painting starts with a pure vision. Every brushstroke leads you further away from the vision. At the end, if the vision is barely discernible, be grateful." Remaining true to his vision, never following trends, he constantly grew as an artist and intellectual. His own toughest critic, he painted until severe chronic illness ended his life.
John Register was born Feb 1, 1939 in New York City. Graduating from New Jersey's Lawrenceville School in 1957 he enrolled at U C Berkeley, majoring in English despite strong interest in art, also studying at Los Angeles' Art Center School of Design and Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. In 1972, at the height of a successful advertising career, Register acknowledged his deep unhappiness with corporate life. John Register at 33 quit his job as art director at a high-powered New York advertising agency and became a painter. During an important business meeting he stood up, quietly mentioned a dentist appointment, left and never returned to the office. He spent a year in New York, painting every day, and studied briefly at the Art Students League before moving his family back to California to dedicate himself entirely to art.
Early in his new career Register was influenced by photorealist artists Richard Estes and Ralph Goings. Unlike these painters Register used photographs merely as a starting point for his work. In the late 1970s Los Angeles Times art critic Henry Seldis wrote that Register was "an extraordinary painter whose external realism is based on metaphysical and psychological concepts along with a highly persuasive manner of painting." Based in Los Angeles his finely-executed realist paintings documented contemporary American scenes which fascinated and appalled him. Register's subject matter personified "something we experience universally, a kind of common denominator of interior space..."
Register's interests included race car driving, surfing, swimming, running and tennis. Throughout his adult life he battled severe medical problems. Despite an incredible will to live and a refusal to allow illness to interfere with his painting, in 1996 he died of cancer at 57, leaving behind a wife, 3 grown children and a grandson. John Register's friend Barnaby Conrad III wrote the essay for his catalogue John Register: Persistent Observer (Woodford Publishing, 192 pages, $45)