John Page

John H. Page was an American printmaker, painter, and professor of art who taught for thirty-three years at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. He grew up in Michigan (Ann Arbor, Detroit and Muskegon), where his father was an architect.

After high school, he attended the Minneapolis School of Art as a Pillsbury Scholar during 1940-42, and the Art Student’s League in New York. Drafted into the Army in 1943, he returned to school when WWII ended two years later. He married Mary Lou Franks in 1945. He earned a BFA in design at the University of Michigan in 1948, and an MFA in printmaking at the University of Iowa in 1950.

His first teaching positions were at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas NM, and Mankato State College in Minnesota. In 1954, he joined the faculty at the Iowa State Teachers College (now University of Northern Iowa), where he taught for more than three decades (with the exception of a single year, when he served as Department Head at the University of Omaha in Nebraska). He retired from teaching at UNI in 1988.

For many people, John Page is especially known for his nuanced depictions of landscape and still-life views. Particularly admired are his small prints called the River Series (as shown in left column), in which he celebrates the richness of everyday settings along the Cedar River, which runs through downtown Cedar Falls.

But in truth, a wider survey of his work confirms that, over a lifetime, he was highly experimental, and eager to explore a wide range of styles, from on-site drawing and painting to expressionism to geometric abstraction, including works entirely based on the golden section.

SOURCE - http://www.bobolinkbooks.com/BALLAST/johnpage.html (Oct 2025)