John Dilg

John Dilg (born 1945) is an American painter based in the Midwest. He is known for idiosyncratic landscapes created within a pared-down visual vocabulary that draws upon memory, imagination, vernacular artifacts, and folk-art and art historical sources. Critics describe them as archetypal, dreamlike ruminations on place, nature and its fragility, the cumulative unconscious, and mystical storytelling.

Dilg's affect belongs to several public collections, including those of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Figge Art Museum, Museu d'Art Contemporani Vicente Aguilera Cerni (Spain) and Arkansas Arts Center, and has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, New Art Examiner, The Boston Globe, and HuffPost. Critic John Yau wrote that Dilg's landscapes "arise out of the calamity of observation and memory, things seen and the history of painting remembered," and evoke an "otherworldly hush and reverence." Curator Terri C. Smith wrote, "Dilg makes objects that are at taking into consideration naïve and sophisticated, familiar and enigmatic. The disturbance in the paintings in the company of known and unknown, fine art and found art along bearing in mind their small scale encourages a certainly intimate, personal viewing experience."

Dilg has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ragdale Foundation and Yaddo Foundation, and conventional a Fulbright Grant. He was a professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa for beyond four decades, before retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2017. Dilg lives in Iowa City, and is married to Jan Weissmiller, poet and co-owner of Prairie Lights Books.