John Jellico was an artist, educator, and writer, with a life and career that spanned several states, industries, and genres.
Born to Austrian immigrants (his gravestone marker notes that his mother was a passenger on the Carpathia when it rescued Titanic shipwreck survivors), Jellico was raised in northern New Mexico and graduated from Raton High School in Raton, NM. He set his sights on the artistic profession from an early age, and worked diligently to achieve his goal. According to an unpublished biography written by his daughter, Nancy Norris Jellico, “his quest for knowledge about art and artists was insatiable and he was never idle. In high school his teachers discovered his art ability and kept him busy with posters, backdrops for plays, and other school artwork. He sketched and painted constantly.”1
Jellico was also aided in his quest during his high school years by Manville Chapman, a noted artist with ties to Taos, NM, originally from Raton. Chapman immediately recognized Jellico’s talent and exchanged art lessons for modeling work. With Chapman’s help, Jellico was able to start selling paintings, adding those earnings to the savings he was putting away for art school from his summer jobs as a ranch hand.
After graduating high school in 1934, Jellico immediately enrolled in The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. After his first year, he was awarded a scholarship which enabled him to squeeze his next two years into one by taking both day and evening classes. After graduating in 1936, Jellico pursued another year of study at the Phoenix Institute of Art in New York City, where he trained with top illustrators of the period, including Norman Rockwell. Reportedly, Rockwell criticized Jellico’s drawing of horses, to which Jellico retorted that he had no right to do since Rockwell had never lived in the West. Jellico spent the next five years mainly working as a book illustrator and commercial artist, while also showing and selling at Greenwich Village galleries and continuing his education through night classes at the Grand Central School of Art.
While living in New York City, Jellico maintained his ties to New Mexico, exhibiting in Raton in at least 1938 and 1941. Additionally, according to his daughter’s biography, he spent the summer of 1937 in New Mexico during which he painted a mural for a church in Raton. Perhaps that is also when he became involved in the state’s federal art programs. In an undated, handwritten note to Kathryn Flynn, author of Public Art and Architecture in New Mexico: 1933-1943, Jellico reported that he produced “a large number of easel paintings” for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). He also describes being hired by the WPA to create twenty-seven ceiling decorations with Juanita Lantz for the Raton Public Library (since demolished).2
In 1942, Jellico enlisted and spent the bulk of his military service working under the Chief of Chaplains of the US Air Force and painting murals for sixty-three Air Force chapels.
At the end of WWII, he was offered a job as an instructor at his alma mater, The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where he would also become the Assistant Director in three years’ time. With the West calling him home, he moved to Denver, CO, in the mid-1950s to help build the Colorado Institute of Art, leading the school until its sale in 1975 (after which it became the Art Institute of Colorado; now closed).
While fulfilling his role as art educator and administrator, Jellico also authored several instructional books, including How to Draw Horses for Commercial Art (1946) and textbooks for the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, became a magazine editor and writer, and co-founded a gallery in Santa Fe in 1969, which prompted him to return full-time to painting and exhibiting.
