John Grazier was born in Long Beach, NY in 1946, and is an American realist painter, working with India ink airbrush, pencil and oil paint. He is an American artist of the late-20th century known for his meticulous cross-hatching technique, skewed perspective, and a "dreamlike" representation of seemingly ordinary subjects, such as buses, coffee cups, office buildings,[6] Victorian-style porches, and phone booths.
In 1968 Grazier studied at the Corcoran School of Art, and in 1971-72 he attended the Maryland Institute College of Art for a year. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1974) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He also won first place in the 1975 Davidson National Print and Drawing Competition.
Grazier started drawing images of coffee cups, buses, diners, tunnels and bridges at the beginning of his career in 1973. During the 1990s, his subject matter evolved further, focusing on facades of Victorian architecture buildings, railed porches and balconies, windows, elaborate moldings, phones and drawing people.
In 2001, Grazier started working in color using oil paints.
His works, “House on a Hill in a Dream” (1974) and “Memory of a Porch” (1976), are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Another pencil drawing “End of the Line” (1980) is in the Art Institute of Chicago. “Breaking Up” (1976) and “Memory of a Porch (1975) are in the National Gallery of Art. The drawing “Passing Windows in Fall” is included in the Hechinger Collection “Tools as Art.” His works are also included in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington, DC, and the Arkansas Arts Center. Two of his works, "Untitled" and "Rattling Windows", are included in the Pollock-Krasner Foundation image collection.
His works are also included in the following university collections: “City Lines” (1978) Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (Waltham, Massachusetts), Davidson College (Davidson, North Carolina), Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire), University of Rochester (Rochester, New York), and Wellesley College (Wellesley, Massachusetts).
