Hall, John

John Hall graduated from the Alberta College of Art (ACA, now Alberta University of the Arts) in 1965 and then spent a year at Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Hall was introduced to the relatively new medium of acrylic paint at ACA. Though most Realist painters work in oil, Hall was determined to paint Realist still lifes in acrylic. He forged ahead and developed his own unique method for the medium.

As a result of his mastery of the acrylic medium, John Hall’s paintings are easily recognizable—highly realistic, they lack any indication of the artist’s hand. Throughout his career he has focussed almost exclusively on painting still lifes of every day objects and the way light falls on them.

Professor of painting and drawing from 1971 to 1997 at the University of Calgary, Hall was awarded Professor Emeritus status in 1998. Hall was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1975. Hall’s work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada Council Art Bank, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, amongst many others.

Over the course of his career, John Hall has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. Notable among his numerous solo exhibitions are John Hall: Paintings and Auxiliary Works at the National Gallery of Canada which toured nationally in 1979, and in 1993 a major retrospective, John Hall: Traza de Evidencia at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno. In 2016 to 2017, another major retrospective, Travelling Light: A forty-five year survey of paintings was shown both at the Kelowna Art Gallery and the Nickle Galleries in Calgary.

John Hall currently lives and works in Kelowna, British Columbia.