John Marsh
John Marsh
PO Box 1240
West Point, CA, 95255-1240
USA
Tel: 1-209-293-7088
John Francis Marsh's career as a world-renowned industrial designer and artist began when he was still a high school student in Connecticut submitting model cars to the GM Fisher Body Craftsman Guild Scholarship contest. At this time he also began designing silverware and painting in watercolors and oil. Marsh is an alumnus of the Los Angeles Art Center School and a veteran of the General Motors Design Center and Sundberg-Ferar Industrial design.
In 1961 Marsh founded Hisata, Ishimaru, Montgomery & Marsh, an industrial design consultancy in San Francisco. He has continued to serve his clients since these early days of industrial design on the west coast with his firm the Marsh Design Office. While at GM he grew to love the engineering alchemy that turns paper design into three-dimensional painted metal.
This
interdisciplinary experience, which brought together business, engineering and
art, gave Marsh the energy and imagery that he has developed into his shop
scene style of painting. It is in these shop scenes that John's passion for
history is unveiled, as each one tells the story from the concept to the
finished product. Marsh's reputation as a serious artist was firmly established
before he bean painting his now famous auto themes. His painterly realism, his
sense of drama, his classic use of color show in all his paintings, whether it
be children on pedal cars, antique racing, romance of the automobile, or the
design of the VW Concept 1 car.
In 2002 he was asked to teach in the
Industrial Design Department of The Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
The school wanted him to create and teach a new curriculum for the course -
History of Industrial design and to teach in person young industrial designers
how to draw, in a course called Design Drawing 2. Later that year, he was asked
by the Cyber Campus Director to rewrite this history course to be the first
History of Industrial Design to be taught online. He continues to build and
teach courses for the on line department. His fine art paintings are shown in
art galleries and at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in August of each
year, along with his fellow members of The Automotive Fine Art Society. He has
won many awards for his work. In 2004 he won the prestigious Lincoln of the
Ford Motor Company's award for "The most Elegant Painting" in the show.