Jon Stroup

Aside from Saturday morning classes at the Cleveland School of Art, Stroup is a self-taught artist. He spent most of his adult life as a magazine editor, first at Town & Country, then at House and Garden, and began to draw only after moving to Nantucket Island. Working initially in felt-tipped pen, Stroup depicted the flat Nantucket landscape, but turned to watercolor after his first exhibition. On the recommendation of a friend, who explained that the drawings failed to sell because Stroup used no color, he bought a set of watercolors. In 1976, having found acrylic an unsatisfactory medium, Stroup began working in his now-preferred medium of oil. Currently concerned primarily with the figure, Stroup creates a sense of enigmatic relationships among the small groups of people he portrays.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)