John Pitre

Who is John Pitre?

John Pitre is an American visionary art painter based in Hawaii. He has been called the most bankable living American surrealist.

One of John Pitre's best known paintings is A New Dawn, a 1965 work which shows a modern human reduced to the status of a caveman in the midst of smoldering urban ruins. This painting, in the weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks more than thirty five years later, was seen by some as a foreshadowing of what came to be known as the Ground Zero of those events. In 2004, the owner of the original painting, which was valued in 1997 at $1.7 million, offered A New Dawn in trade for a £1 million house on the London real estate market.

John Pitre's art addresses issues such as ecology, overpopulation, responsibility for stewardship of the Earth, the quest to understand the mysteries of the universe, and the fragility of life and of relationships. Posters of his paintings were very popular in the 1960s and 1970s and one of them, a print of his painting Restrictions, has sold several million copies.

John Pitre studied at the Art Students League of New York and has lived and worked in Hawaii for three decades.