The surfaces in my painting recall the appearance of the ocean: the viewer is placed above or among images that conform to swells and troughs.
-Elizabeth Johnson
Ngaio Marsh, 24" x 30", Oil On Canvas
Artist Statement
I make dimensional oil paintings that render warped photograph fragments as curvilinear forms. The surfaces in my painting recall the appearance of the ocean: the viewer is placed above or among images that conform to swells and troughs. A desire to resist storytelling underlies my urge to imagine a churning, interlocking volume of activity. This year I am excited about the areas where I have removed paint with a palette knife: I am working back into these wet colors to suggest an undulating, multi-colored veneer, where recognizable image fragments seem continuous with or sunk into drapery-like folds. This technique helps me visualize my source images as layers in flux. My long-term practice of manipulating photo fragments, and of elevating paint handling procedures above narrative, is rejuvenated by making oil paint look ragged, diffuse, and borderless.
Attamaroov, 52" x 64", Oil On Canvas
Elizabeth Johnson is an artist, writer and curator based in Easton, Pennsylvania. After receiving her B.A. in Fine Arts from Bard College, Johnson moved to San Francisco where she lived, worked and exhibited until 2010. Since returning to the northeast, she has exhibited her work widely in exhibitions across the region including at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, Trestle Gallery in New York, and the Allentown Art Museum. She has curated exhibitions at Gross McCleaf Gallery, Soft Machine Gallery and Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Lafayette College in Easton and many others. Her writing has been featured in the Brooklyn Rail, Theartblog.com, Deliciousline.org, Figure/Ground.org and many others. Her work will be featured in a 2024 solo exhibition at Gross McCleaf Gallery.
Iota, 20" x 16", Oil On Canvas
Pete Sparber talks with Elizabeth Johnson, a longtime Artblog contributor, about her solo exhibit at Gross McCleaf Gallery. Titled 'The Cost of Sleep', the show presents large and small oil paintings that are dreamscapes of tornado-like swirlings, very beautiful, energetic, and a little terrifying. Johnson says she is against a narrative thread in her works and will adjust her canvases to erase story lines, saying, "If I put objects together that look like they're going to suggest a narrative, I'll get rid of one thing and search for a fringe subject...I destroy a lot of what I paint.” Enjoy this interesting interview! The show's up through March 30. - Description from theartblog.org
Sharon Garbe: Your whirlwind works have no beginning or end. You put images, which are stand-ins for experience, through a battery of digital ocean waves and vortexes to see how they fare. Then you reclaim the pixels and submit them to a different kind of fluidity. You play with space, time, memory, repetition and change, possibilities, and meaning. Could a subtitle for your show be “We Are an Unfinished Story”?
Elizabeth Johnson: Definitely. Humans have time and hope, and it’s logical to pose indefinite, multiple endings. It’s also logical to treat photographs as undulating surfaces or sculpture.
If I have anything to add to visual storytelling, it’s that I’m comfortable gathering random, transmuted subjects to make a dreamworld from simultaneous choices.
“How do I choose a subject? I stumble into it, usually if not always, through the work of other painters. Sometimes momentum in the studio leads me. But it is the language of painting that drives me.”
– James Stewart
Gross McCleaf is pleased to present Place Setting, a new series of oil paintings by gallery artist, James Stewart. The works in this exhibition highlight Stewart’s acute awareness of group dynamics, interpersonal relationships and the settings in which these affairs unfold. While a few of Stewart’s outdoor scenes reference broad themes from history and well known stories from antiquity, most of the paintings depict intimate, everyday interactions between family and friends, many around the table of a dinner party.
