The Art of John Agnew
October 30 - November 29, 2025
Naturalist and artist John Agnew combines scientific precision with artistic expression to spotlight the often-overlooked creatures of our world. A former muralist and museum exhibit designer, Agnew now focuses on detailed scratchboard and plein air works. His art—rooted in a lifelong passion for nature—invites viewers to look closer, respect every species, and find beauty in the unexpected.
John Agnew was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had met in art school. Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, he was surrounded by art in his home. His mother was an abstract expressionist painter and illustrator. His father was a talented painter who became a professional photographer.
John’s early interests included dinosaurs, which morphed into a burning interest in living reptiles. His parents fostered his other interests, fossils, astronomy, and geology by enrolling him in classes at the Dayton Museum of Natural History. He ended up working at the museum, first as a “Jr. Curator” taking care of the live animal display. He eventually ended up in the Exhibits department, marrying his interest in natural history with his artistic talents. This became a career goal, and John got a degree in Fine Arts, with a lot of natural science courses on the side. After job designing exhibits for a small science museum in West Palm Beach, FL., he decided to focus on his art and left his position as a curator to paint scenes from south Florida and Central America.
A commission to paint diorama backdrops for the new Cat House at the Cincinnati Zoo brought him back to Ohio. Later, he designed a new walk through cave exhibit for the new Cincinnati Museum of Natural History in Union Terminal. Around the same time, he was painting the murals of Ice Age scenes in a different part of the museum. Other mural projects ranged from dinosaurs at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science to more zoo murals in Moscow, Russia. In 2001, North Light Books published his book on his painting techniques, “Painting the Secret World of Nature.”
His smaller fine art paintings ended up in collections around the world, and were displayed at US Embassies in Minsk, Belarus and San Jose, Costa Rica. He has won numerous awards in national and international shows and has been published in various magazines and his art adorns paleontology book covers. His show of his scratchboard art, “Crocodilian Scratchboards,” toured US museums from 2014 to 2023.
John has retired from doing large mural projects, but he is concentrating on scratchboard and smaller paintings in his studio in Northside, Cincinnati, and plein aire paintings while traveling.
My art is born from a deep interest in the natural world. I want to share that world as I see it, both for the artistic expression and to impart some awareness and knowledge of our natural surroundings. Much of that imagery concerns the “unloved” citizens of nature. The cute and fuzzy get far too much attention, in my opinion. Every species is deserving of our respect, no matter how “ugly” we might think it is.
My art techniques are born from a desire to accurately represent the world, but incorporate the influences of my mother’s abstract expressionism in my compositions. I was trained in oils, but switched to acrylic when doing large murals, and that medium then dominated my studio. My scratchboard techniques are born from an interest in the engravings of animals we see in old zoology texts from the 19th century and earlier, before the use of photography. I actually started using scratchboard initially to illustrate cave landscapes, the perfect medium for bright highlights and inky black shadows.
