Bennett Galleries Nashville

John Hyche

A native of Birmingham, John Hyche attended public schools where he remembers taking only one art course. Even then, however, his painting was abstract. Though he maintained an interest in art, it would be some thirty-five years and retirement from his first career before he returned to his love of art.

His first attempt at returning to art was to take a short course in realistic painting. But it wasn't long before he returned to abstraction. In canvases as well as works on paper, John shows us that compositions of lines, shapes, and colors, sometimes with the addition of found objects like newsprint, cardboard, sandpaper, netting, and sand, can possess aesthetic qualities in their own right. Hyche's masterful handling of the formal elements of his art is further matched by the universal expressive qualities with which he imbues his works. His large canvases often envelope viewers in a sublime experience of self awareness, and rouse awe at the external world and their relationship to it.

John was formerly director of the Loretta Goodwin Gallery in Birmingham until August 1997 when he decided to pursue his love of painting full-time. His works hang in numerous private and corporate collections including Compass Bank, Eason, Graham and Sandner, Inc. Burr and Foreman Attorneys, Winston Groom (author of Forrest Gump) and Camryn Manheim (The Practice).