John Suro

MFA ’20 Fine Arts Low-Residency

I am a spiritual seeker. I seriously consider and reconsider what the idea of God/Absolute/Source means. I have learned to seek peace and answers from within myself – a place I think of as innerspace. In my innerspace, I process dialectics which cause me most to wonder: God/human, alive/not alive, illness/healing, attention/unmindfulness, love/sexuality, depression/anger, coincidence/ inexplicable, peace/fear(resistance), and truth/illusion. 

When I make art, I have had to wrestle these dialectics down and come to a place of quiet and balance – even momentarily, just to begin. As I work, the wrestling returns and the process becomes a challenging back and forth. Ultimately, I may express the positive, the negative, or at best – the in-between. I have that way of seeing which sees a universe in a marble, dancers in scratches on a wall, and living energy in wrinkles. Texture, therefore, has dominated my work, because of its ability to express life under the microscope at innerspace, however, the texture is receding, revealing more and more negative space. The seeker continues as artist, found for a while in texture, but the void reappears.



John Suro was born in Meriden, CT. He received a BA in Visual Art and Urban Studies from The College of the Holy Cross in 1987 and MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2020. In between he was a graphic design art director then changed careers to education. He has been teaching art to elementary and middle school students in New Haven, CT for the past 10 years. He shares a home in Cheshire, CT with his friend Randee, two dogs (Will and Coco), and two cats (Midnight and Shadow).

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