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JOHN REGISTER photosurrealist artist

John Register, one of his generation's most distinctive realist painters, painted surreally still predestined resolution, a mortal moment trapped on canvas, realist visions of faith and fear in equal proportions. Recurring, hauntingly seductive imagery characterize Register's paintings - stark interiors of diners, waiting rooms, bus depots, empty chairs in old hotel lobbies and vacant, mundane offices. Settings included Los Angeles and desert landscape, New York and urban streetscape, and suburbs. People are rare in his pictures. Register's paintings, permeated with pristine light and rich colors, reveal unerring recognition of existential essences of everyday scenes. Often compared with Edward Hopper, Register said, "Hopper paints someone else's isolation. In my pictures you're the isolated one."

Register's use of his own photographs as a source of imagery and composition let him evoke the essence of ordinary objects and anonymous places he visited on car and train trips nationwide most of his life. His compositions were often derived from or enhanced by photocopies of photos reducing them to bold, simplified shapes of dark and light. Often Register eliminated larger details such as barber stools, wall coverings, cars, people. Summing up this reductive approach he said, "Painting is less rendering and more distillation. Every painting starts with a pure vision. Every brushstroke leads you further away from the vision. At the end, if the vision is barely discernible, be grateful." Remaining true to his vision, never following trends, he constantly grew as an artist and intellectual. His own toughest critic, he painted until severe chronic illness ended his life.

John Register was born Feb 1, 1939 in New York City. Graduating from New Jersey's Lawrenceville School in 1957 he enrolled at U C Berkeley, majoring in English despite strong interest in art, also studying at Los Angeles' Art Center School of Design and Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. In 1972, at the height of a successful advertising career, Register acknowledged his deep unhappiness with corporate life. John Register at 33 quit his job as art director at a high-powered New York advertising agency and became a painter. During an important business meeting he stood up, quietly mentioned a dentist appointment, left and never returned to the office. He spent a year in New York, painting every day, and studied briefly at the Art Students League before moving his family back to California to dedicate himself entirely to art.

Early in his new career Register was influenced by photorealists Richard Estes and Ralph Goings. Unlike them Register used photographs merely as a starting point for his work. In the late 1970s Los Angeles Times art critic Henry Seldis called Register "an extraordinary painter whose external realism is based on metaphysical and psychological concepts and highly persuasive painting." Based in Los Angeles his finely-executed realist paintings documented contemporary American scenes which fascinated and appalled him. Register's subject matter personified "something we experience universally, a common denominator of interior space."

Register's interests included race car driving, surfing, swimming, running and tennis. All his adult life he was in poor health. Despite an incredible will to live and a refusal to allow illness to interfere with his painting, in 1996 he died of cancer at 57, leaving behind a wife, 3 grown children and a grandson. John Register's friend Barnaby Conrad III wrote the essay for his catalogue.

Perry Como, crooning baritone barber

Famous for relaxed vocals, cardigan sweaters and TV Christmas specials, synonymous with mellow. His idol Bing Crosby called him the man who invented casual. Como left his job as a steel town barber to sing with big bands in the 1930s. His songs were a late 1940s radio and jukebox mainstay. He helped pioneer TV variety shows in the 1950s and sang on TV specials.