John Alan Stock

About the exhibition

John Alan Stock is an artist based in Virginia Beach. A prolific painter and draftsman with an extensive career in architecture, he estimates having produced over four thousand works of art since 1967. This exhibition features a selection of his recent paintings and one early drawing.

Moving between hazy abstraction and the tangible linearity of charts, maps, and architectural drawings, Stock evokes both the diagrams and thought patterns of a mind coming to greater awareness. However, as his reference to conspiracy theory suggests, whether that awareness is accurate or misled remains in tension. How one creates an accurate picture of themselves is both a visual and a philosophical problem. Does the picture correspond to reality? Anyone whose mind has deceived them or presented a false picture of the world clouded by emotions, illness, or bad information will recognize how difficult it can be to answer that question, a question Stock considers with the utmost seriousness in his art.