John “Mac” McWilliams hails from Virginia, and grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond Professional Institute) before going on to Purdue University in Indiana for an MA in painting. At Purdue, on a Teaching Assistantship, he had his first taste of teaching drawing and painting, which he has continued through to the present day.


For years, Mac exhibited his artwork , which at that time consisted of large-scale shaped canvases and color fields. He was included in shows at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, and in Biennales at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Mt. San Angelo) and at Creekwood Colony for the Arts in Alabama. He had a yearlong Artist-in-Residency at Millersville State College (now University) in Pennsylvania.


During these years, he worked at a number of occupations to support, as he calls it, his “painting habit”. Early on, he worked in the museum field in positions from Preparator to Director/Curator and later as a Cartographer/ Architectural Draftsman and Designer. All along, he continued to teach part time at Community Colleges both as adjunct faculty and through their extension departments. But it was a weekend job as a movie extra, a job he took as a lark, which led him to California; he caught the movie bug.


Mac worked for years in Hollywood as a Set Designer, Art Director, but primarily as a propmaster on scores of movie and TV productions. On trips up the California coast from L.A., he became enamored with Monterey and the surrounding countryside, and became acquainted with and influenced by the historic California Plein Aire school of landscape painting as exemplified by William Wendt, Percy Gray, Edgar Payne, etc. He and Serina Chee, also an artist, were married in 1993 and settled in the Monterey area, eventually opening a bookstore in the Cannery Row district dealing in old and rare books. He became a member of the Carmel Art Association in 1996, and in November, 2000 had a one-man exhibition.


He participated in a number of Plein Air painting competitions, both in Carmel and Tucson, exhibiting in the shows associated with both. During the Carmel Arts Festival, he received a Mayor’s Choice award twice, in 1997, again in 1999. He was included in the show, “Monterey-Carmel Art Colony, Past & Present” at the California Heritage Gallery in San Francisco, as well as in the “Endangered Landscapes” show at the Salinas Courthouse. His paintings have been in exhibitions at the Monterey Museum of Art, the Lisa Coscino Gallery in Pacific Grove and the Milagro Gallery in Tucson, Arizona. He presently teaches Life Figure Painting and drawing through the Carmel Adult School.

John McWilliams paints on location

Artist’s Statement: My attitude towards, or philosophy of art cannot be summed-up in a phrase or two. Indeed, painting for me takes place fundamentally in the pre-vocal, pre-conceptualized state. It is the brushstroke and the composition that interests me nowadays, and the serendipitously or intentionally admixture of juxtaposed colors. Trying to affect a mood or make a statement with my art has never been a main goal; the imagery is almost secondary, the application and process primary.