Johnny DeFeo (b. 1985) received an MFA in painting from the University of Colorado in 2017. Shortly after graduating he co-founded Adventure Painting, a traveling artist residency, alongside painter Aaron Zulpo. The Adventure Painting residency takes artists out of their studios and into America's most beautiful locations with the goal of expanding the visual lexicon of landscape painting. Adventure Painting was selected as an Armory Show off-site project in 2021, and featured in the New York Times.
DeFeo’s aesthetic is wild and playful, utilizing a dose of humor to create objects that illuminate the connections between beauty both quintessential and manufactured. His work consists primarily of landscape scenes, many of which include animals. Often, the perspective expressed in these scenes is that of the animal, shifting the subject away from a human vantage point and revealing the mysteries of the natural world. Imagining that the creatures inhabiting America’s wilderness could be storytellers through objects and images the way that humans can, these objects portray the natural world with a tender perspective, and with mystical and legendary qualities.