Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to David Johnson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

David, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My father passed from profound Alzheimer’s this spring. The journey was strange and difficult. Dementia is a plague upon our modern society, shattering lives in its wake. Those suffering have their identities and dignity torn from them, leaving a ghostlike echo of the person that was there before. I am exploring what I have personally observed about that process with my father and the haunting result of a mind in free fall.

These works center around a group of photographs of abandoned adobes and lost vistas in the West Texas desert that I took this summer in preparation for these paintings. In those photos, where life was, only shells remain. What life is there is often solitary and hard-won. Those photos are then paired with abstract, mixed media painting and an array of vintage papers, found objects and other ephemera in an attempt to express fragmented shards of memory. The series title is a reference to a poem by Geoffrey Anketell Studdert-Kennedy. Scottish “Peter Pan” author JM Barrie quoted that poem in a 1922 speech about courage, “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” But no memory means no remembered blooms in the chill of the December of life. I can only hope to express in some small way the harrowing, lonely, and wistful process of memory loss through this series.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a mixed media visual artist. The rhythmic, the esoteric, the mystic, the poetic, and the intuitive drive my work. All of those shape my aesthetic and give my pieces backbone. The breadth of the sublime, the mist of inner spaces, and the intrinsically American are also found on my canvases. My long background as both a writer and designer roots the abstract work in language, both conceptual and visual.

I am most interested in exploring belief systems, the birth and death of the American Dream, the nature and validity of desire, as well as identity and loss on a personal level. Visually, my work lies at the intersection of the organic, the geometric, the iconic, the abstract, and the found. All of that takes shape into mostly large-scale assemblage pieces that hover in between mediums. I feel like my body of work can be encapsulated in three words :: abstraction, definition and deconstruction.

I have shown solo at The Everson Museum of Art, had works appear in juried art shows across the US, shown with selected galleries, have shown in several cities with The Other Art Fair, had my work featured on the album art for multi-platinum-selling musical artist Andy Grammer, been chosen from over 100,000 artists to be featured in the Saatchi Art catalog, had my work published in multiple art magazines and publications, and was selected for inclusion in the London Art Biennale.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

As I move along with my practice, I think the goal in many ways becomes about shedding the self — getting ego out of the way and becoming a transparent lens to The Muse. I feel like that’s when the work takes on a special vibrance. Yes, I think it’s good for the art to have purpose and to bear the “mark of the artist,” but I think the purest expression comes from that clearest lens to the impetus for the work.

Artists are always trying to strike a balance between what feeds us and what feeds our soul. It’s never an easy thing to do, but it’s essential to the development of a living artistic practice. For me, getting myself out of it as much as I can during the creative process and just expressing is key. But then also approaching the promotion and marketing of the practice with purpose and drive. Again a balance, but that’s the contemporary artist’s life.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Creation! Creation! Creation!

I am hard wired to create, so it’s like oxygen for me. It nourishes me and I need it to live.

As a child, I was forever drawing, dreaming and reading comic books. That comic aesthetic still influences my art today. I only added influences from there and never stopped creating.

I’m a huge observer of the world around me and that has shaped my desire to be an artist as well. I am constantly cataloging images, ideas, and influences from all aspects of my world. Art, music, things I just see and experience in my daily life… It all shapes and drives me to express myself through art.

One of the earliest pieces I clearly remember was a drawing I did of the police van from the 1975 TV show S.W.A.T. I was 5. Why I chose that, I have no idea. I can remember trying to get the 3-D perspective right, and probably failing. But heck, I was trying. Speaking of that time… Being a young kid in the 1970s was awesome. It was a wonderfully outlandish, cartoonish, exaggerated time to be alive. There’s no question that a bit of that flavors my work today as well.

Now that I think about it, that answer seems simple, but it really is the most profoundly rewarding aspect of this for me!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.davidedwardjohnsonart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidedwardjohnsonart/

Image Credits

All Images David Edward Johnson