John Duckworth was born in 1972 in San Diego, California. He moved to Charleston, South Carolina in the early 90’s, and then into a 1910 farmhouse on neighboring Johns Island in 2007. His artistic practice extends across photography, painting, printing, video, design and performance. He received his B.A. in Studio Art from the College of Charleston after a brief foray into biological science at UC Davis in 1990, an influence still evident in his subject matter today.
Duckworth is most well known for his painterly abstract landscape photography of the Southeast coast, wherein the images read as luminous, rhythmic color field paintings. He has been actively producing this body of work, the Landscape Abstracts, since 2003. They represent his ongoing meditation with the natural world, and the resulting work reflects this contemplative approach.
In 2006 he began exploring Eastern spiritual practices in earnest, developing a consistent yoga and meditation practice to complement his sojourns in nature. This practice became fundamental to his creative process, and it is through this lens that a new body of work emerged. The resulting art reveals a unique East/West dialogue through harmonized compositions of screen printing, painting, drawing, photography, and video, evoking questions of identity, purpose, and perspective through an immersive multimedia experience involving video, music, performance, painting, and photography.
John’s work resides in private and corporate collections around the globe, and he has taken part in over 50 shows since 2000, including solo exhibitions in London, Atlanta, Charleston, Birmingham, Jacksonville, Savannah, Orlando, and Miami. He has shown at Art Basel, Miami; the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston; the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston; ArtFields, Lake City; Youngblood Gallery, Atlanta; and the Reece Museum, Johnson City. In 2012 he was profiled as one of Charleston’s 50 Most Progressive People by Charlie Magazine; in 2015 he was selected as one of Charleston’s 40 Most Influential Visual Artists from 1670-2015 by Charleston Magazine, and in 2017 he was featured as One of Ten Artists Shaping the Arts in Charleston by Charleston Art Mag.
