John Charles Koebert was born in 1948 in Washington, DC and lived in the Congress Heights community for nearly seven years. At the age of six and a half, he ran away from home, using his tricycle as the getaway vehicle. Fortunately, his parents caught up with him before he got within a few hundred yards of home and took him to Northern Virginia where he would be raised.
In 1972, John earned a Degree in Fine Art from Bridgewater College and came home to establish an art studio on his parent’s farm in Orlean, Virginia. The studio was a tack house, a small two room building that was used primarily for saddlery; but there was enough room for a worktable, small easel and supply cabinet to get a reasonable start. Here, he would work on his early paintings and drawings until he found a larger studio that would accompany his soon-to-be large size canvases, and where he could hold art classes in drawing and painting.
This would last until the spring of 1981, when because of a family emergency, he had to abandon his art and start a long thirty-five career with a prominent hotel company. All his early work was stored away in closets, under beds and any place that could afford to handle the multitude of paintings and drawings.
John retired from corporate life in 2016. Since that time, he has dedicated himself to continuing his art on a full-time basis. He has shown and sold work in Northern Virginia and has been a member of Foundry Gallery in Washington, DC since 2021.
Artist Statement
When I was twenty-two and a senior history major in college, a close friend invited me to look at her paintings and drawings. After seeing her work, I remember telling her, “You are a very good artist, but I have no artistic talent”. “Everyone has talent,” she replied. “You just have to discover it, develop it and make it into something of yourself”.
Her words must have made a strong impression because the following semester, I changed my major to art, and as my parents said, “would be taking a hard 90-degree left to nowhere. But a year and a half later, there I was holding a Degree in Fine Art and working in a studio on my parents’ farm.
My earliest work post-college was mostly portraits and landscapes, the latter with geometric applications, which included a fascination with seesaws. Then in 1973, I happened upon an article on the work of Budd Hopkins, a renowned geometric abstract artist.
I was immediately moved to follow in his direction. The result was Harmony in a Blue Field, and it was the beginning of a lifelong exploration of abstract geometric design.
In time, I started seeing my work as not just abstracts, but entities. As I was willing to leave such imperfections as pimples of dried paint, the occasional hair or two and leftover scars from cuts of tape, it allowed my work to take on a personality or character.
Finally, the geometric patterns, their sharp edges and gentle shading come as my own indifference to these imperfections as I attempt to place the works under my control. While doing so and realizing that my creations are no longer “abstract”, there is an attempt to establish a conversation between the work, myself and eventually the viewer. It is one that is deeply personal in nature, and I feel that I am somehow symbolically reaching out to the viewer with my story, using the work as the storyteller.
