In 1986, John Capitano began to paint using a system of chance to select colors. This strategy is as follows:

He chooses an area to be painted. He then throws a dart at the dartboard bull's eye. 

When a numbered wedge is struck, he then paints with its predetermined hue.

Carried out in a playful spirit, this arbitrary system results in unique color combinations. To resolve a painting the game-playing shifts to problem-solving, still maintaining this chance process.

John continues to work within this process because his artistic concerns still revolve around elements of play and discovery. However, while his concerns are with visual dynamics - the play of color, visual effects and the visceral nature of paint, its various applications and interactions - Capitano is intrigued by the tension between these strictly painterly or abstract concerns and representational imagery.

Having worked through a wide range of imagery including still life whose status historically as low art makes it an appropriate place to explore freely. More recently John has returned to even more banal subjects that also lend a sense of humor to his work. Confronting the mundane nature of everyday life, representing everything from the kitchen sink and its usual forms of disarray to the formidable state of the bathroom - a rare subject in the realm of art.

Though the playful nature of the subject compliments the process, there often remains a tension intrinsic to this same process - the tension between chaos and order, struggle and play, indeterminacy and self-expression.

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Continue to John Capitano's C.V