Athens, Georgia-based artist Carol John received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, in New York in 1986. For four decades she’s had a rigorous studio practice, creating brilliantly colored paintings that shift and circle back on themselves over time. Working with oil paint on canvas and paper her work references text, pop graphics, interlocking shapes and symbols. She paints polka dots, ice cream cones, combs, cigarette butts, lips and eyeballs. These banal objects star in her paintings as she is drawn to celebrate the everyday. Erratic patterning and brilliant colors are layered in these paintings in order to surprise a viewer’s sensibility and work to hypnotize and to represent familiar objects in unexpected ways. Her work has been included in the Atlanta Biennial at the Atlanta Contemporary in 2007 and 2019. Her work has been shown in galleries and institutions nationally and has pieces in the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta. Publications that have written about her work include New York Magazine, Burnaway, ArtsAtl, Flagpole, The Bitter Southerner, and others.