John Rego is an illustrator and painter living in Jersey City, NJ. His work is inspired by the absurdities of the human and natural world, reportage illustration pop-surrealism and 19th Century scientific illustration. Rego has experience in editorial, fine art painting, package design, and narrative illustration.
Hunting Tapestries
A small series of two paintings depicting a surrealist modern day take on medieval hunting tapestries. The paintings follow two fictitious prominent businessmen in the New York area as they stroke their ego by conducting elaborate “hunts”.
Aspic Hunt 
Edna’s Revenge
About
John Rego was born in the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations during the year of the 1996 Olympics. As with anybody born on an Olympic year, it was John Rego’s destiny to become an Olympian. The sport, synchronized swimming. Throughout his youth Rego mastered the event. He had the finest backstroke in town, an astonishing butterfly flip, and could dolphin kick better than any dolphin in the Narragansett Bay. However, John Rego was hospitalized with a bad case of the gout in his teens. He was forced to abandon the sport entirely, and turn his attention to visual arts. Armed with a crusty paintbrush and an even crustier tube of cobalt blue, he began to explore the realm of painting. As an outdoors person Rego tends to fixate on the natural world, and is hypnotized by the tiny details of the land around him. He enjoys pushing these details into a surrealist sometimes ridiculous domain. By masking problems facing nature in a relatively humorous way, Rego subtly attaches a deeper meaning to his pieces. Yet he always makes sure to delve into the nonsensical imagery of his cranium in each piece. His work is inspired by a mixture of renaissance, early American, scientific, and pop surrealist painting. Rego enjoys working with a variety of pigments, but since health issues down the road sound delightful to him, he is particularly fond of the cadmiums and cobalts. Rego will continue to combine his exploration of nature and visual arts in future creative practices. Rego also hopes to jump back into synchronized swimming, and win 37 gold medals in the 2024 Olympics.
