John Tweddle

was born in Pinckeneyville, Kentucky in 1938. From an early age, he drew and made things prolifically, inspired by comic books. 

At a certain point, people who knew him referred to him almost automatically as an artist. From 1958, he went on to study at the Kansas City Art Institute and from 1966 at the Atlanta School of Art. The gallery owner Dick Bellamy (Green Gallery) discovered Tweddle and persuaded him to go to New York. There, he held exhibitions and came into contact with Robert C. Scull who was the most important private collector in New York in the sixties and seventies, besides Victor Ganz. Altogether, Scull acquired around thirty of Tweddle's paintings and a reported 2500 drawings. The work in the exhibition is practically the whole collection of John Tweddle's work that Scull owned at the time. 

Tweddle is a man of truck stops, pick-ups, honky-tonk and 'mama hated diesels so bad' (Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen), and other country-related heritage. The fact that his work is full of dollar signs and expletives about the art world, however, leaves little room for nostalgia or sweet-voiced romance.