New Painting - "Pink Chair," 2022-2024 36x24 inches
I’ve been interested in the beach for as long as I can remember. It took a while to realize that what was intriguing me was the way man-made color separates from the backdrop of sky, water, and sand. Even without the strong light of a sunny day, the dreamy space at the beach is unlike any other. Perhaps that’s what calls so many people to the seaside.
When I include umbrellas, towels, or chairs in a composition, I’m turning them into paintings. I'm using them to talk about painterly space. As Deborah Butterfield put it so well on the occasion of her new exhibit of sculptures: "P.S. these are not horses."
P.S. these are not beach chairs.
As much as a painting might begin by referencing a chair right in front of me or a photo I carefully arranged, the chairs in the paintings never really exist. The Pink Chair in this post was, in fact, a blue chair I saw on Cape Cod and was able to draw and paint from life. Then in the studio, the color of the stripes kept changing until the stripes were completely covered and painted dull pink. The dull pink chair sat around the studio for months. Sometimes it was turned to the wall, and sometimes it was staring at me from across the room. Finally, while mixing an orange for a new painting, a voice in my head sent me to get the painting. I quickly reworked the stripes, finally achieving the right combination of clarity and surprise in the colors.
In 2012, the writer Chris Busa, described this process in an article for Provincetown Arts:
“If many of Johnson’s paintings are titled after the places that inspired them, no such places actually exist. Each one is a collage of compressed intimacies spread out over the months it takes to paint them. He has done what Edwin Dickinson called “Premier Coup”, in which a painting is completed outdoors in one blow. Yet his typical practice is to hold a painting for several months, or more, in the studio, to see if a painting stands the test of repeated looking, often involving the process of memory revision, where a succession of impressions gained over weeks or months is expressed as continuous flow.”
Well stated!!!!