John A. Hancock

The Positive Power of Negative Space in Watercolor Sketching

Even before studying art in college and grad school, John began “urban sketching,” regularly spending weekend afternoons among the brownstone buildings of downtown Wichita. After college, he worked with an architectural historian and an archeologist to help them create a book chronicling the material culture of a once wealthy Southern town. For the book, he created drawings of both whole buildings and architectural details of the historic architecture. 

As an art and design professor, and now as an independent artist, John has continued his practice of sketching in widely varied locations. And while his studio art has followed an arc that led him from an early devotion to mid-western regionalism and Edward Hopper through the modernism of Cezanne, Kandinsky, and Gorky … in his sketching, he is an idiosyncratic classicist. 

In addition to helping administer his local Charlottesville, VA USk chapter, he also attends sketch crawls and meet-ups with nearby regional chapters and attended the Chicago International Urban Sketchers Symposium in 2017. For several years, he has been writing a sketching blog (SketchingAlways.wordpress.com) and in 2018 began posting his sketches on Instagram (hancock_john_a). As an independent curator, he recently worked with a regional art center on an exhibition of current urban sketching. 

Find John online at

Facebook:  John A. Hancock

Instagram:  @hancock_john_a

Web:  johnahancock.com