Art of the Rogue

In the weeks months ahead this new website will be expanded to allow local artists to share their work and their stories, and also to sell their art online, but until all of this is set into motion, look at some of our webmaster's paintings!

Featured Artist's Profile:

 John Granacki
"When all you have is a paintbrush, everything is canvas!"

Oil and acrylic paintings rendered on canvas
with knife and brush, often en plein aire!

"When all you have is a shovel..."

I've been a "professional" artist since age 5, when I began selling drawings of bunny rabbits to my Aunt MarilynMarilynMarilyn who was the first serious collector of my work.  Somewhere along the line I dropped the color crayons and moved on to painting, for many years focusing on illustrative fantasy and science fiction.  I still occasionally return to those themes, though typically with a more mythopoeic slant, but lately I've gotten more involved with regional landscapes, in a quicker and looser style which also makes the finished product more affordable.

My work has been the featured attraction of more than a dozen First Friday Art Night exhibits in Grants Pass beginning at Listen Here in 1995 when the art walk was in its infancy.  I'd previously had my work at Yellow Pages Books, the Dan Thompson Gallery, and Elegance Antiques.

That was around the time that I finally graduated from college (a special Thank You to Deans Ted Risser and Galen Carlisle for cutting through some odd bits of red tape), where in addition to having completed the requisite curriculum for the associate's degree in Computer Science (another extra special Thank You to Mike Laam!), a goal that I'd put on hold back in '87, I also picked up a deep understanding of chemistry and the calculus (Thank You John Salinas and Doc Holliday!). These probably influenced the passion I would later develop for molecular nanotechnology, or at least my ability to understand it, but while finishing up at Rogue I became distracted (Thank You Joan Peterson!) by other ways to stretch my mind and imagination, literary wanderings that I found to be ultimately more entertaining than the computer (at least for a time...), and which earned for myself not-insignificant social-standing among the local literati, both for my work on RCC's Rogue's Gallery literary magazine, and as a co-founder (along with Bill Doody and Tee Corrine) of the "Conspiracy of Poets," a weekly literary reading venue which Grants Pass would endure for nearly a decade!

Then I fell in with that Blue Pine crowd, and the next few years were sort of  a blurr...

Anyhow, I still use many of the skills I learned and developed at and on the fringes of Rogue Community College, financing my wildly exuberant lifestyle with all the loot I rake in as a webmaster.  Of course most of my Internet domains don't make a dime, whereas the physical laws of the universe do require me to eat, thus I am always available for other gigs — especially for mural work when I can get it, my portfolio for which includes the largest of the old BLUE PINE BREW PUB murals; the cracked stucco, brick, and ivy Angel on the OLD TOWN ANTIQUE MALL's North wall; and don't forget The Original Grants Pass Door Painting on the east wall of the Grants Pass Museum of Art building (Grants Pass Arts & Fair Trade's back door, behind Paul Hendershott's school of guitar.)  I also strum some rhythm guitar, do a few magic tricks, and I know a lot of really good jokes...