John Dilg
American painter
John Dilg (born 1945) is an American painter based in the Midwest. He is known for idiosyncratic landscapes that use a pared-down visual vocabulary drawing on imagination, vernacular artifacts, folk art and art historical sources. Critics describe them as dreamlike ruminations on place, the fragility of nature, the collective unconscious and mystical storytelling. Precedents for his work that have been cited include 19th-century Romantic landscape painters, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe and Horace Pippin, and the imaginary vistas of Henri Rousseau.
In 2016, John Yau wrote that Dilg's landscapes, "arise out of the collision of observation and memory, things seen and the history of painting remembered," evoking an "otherworldly hush and reverence." Curator Terri C. Smith wrote, "Dilg makes objects that are at once naïve and sophisticated, familiar and enigmatic. The tension in the paintings between known and unknown, fine art and found art along with their small scale encourages a very intimate, personal viewing experience."
Dilg was a professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa for over four decades, before retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2017. He lives in Iowa City, and is married to Jan Weissmiller, poet and owner of Prairie Lights Books. His work belongs to the public art collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museu d'Art Contemporani Vicente Aguilera Cerni (Spain) and Saint Louis Art Museum, among others.
Life and career
Dilg was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1945 and spent his childhood in the Chicago-area with summers in rural Iowa. He earned a BFA degree in painting and filmmaking at Rhode Island School of Design in 1969 and studied at the Lalit Kala Akademi in India (1971–2) through a Fulbright Scholarship.
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