John Hultberg is an American painter born in Berkeley in 1922. An ex-Navy man, many of his paintings have marine themes; port-holes opening into the vast space of the uncluttered sea, the world of the ship with its tightly-organized restrained forms on the edge of space, searchlights probing mysterious platforms. “Flotsam,” the fractured debris of a shipwreck, is a good example of the way he tears down his subject matter and reorganizes it with logic and order. Anchored Freighter, reverses his vision and looks from a stark shore across the sea lane to the hulking ship and receding infinity beyond. Powerful and logical, many of his works are lonely and static, unsentimental. His statements are dramatic, honest and convincing, his color combinations unique, his change in spatial scale abrupt, drastic and sometimes jarring.
—Harriette von Breton
