Introduction to Wykeham Gallery One-Man Show, 2011, by John T. Spike
Christopher Johnson: "Santo Spirito"
Painting should be as pure an art as music, and the struggles of all great painters have been toward that goal. W.H.U. Paris, 1915
The plain plaster facade of Santo Spirito church watches over the end of a leafy piazza where Florentines go to stroll and dine al fresco. Inside a Renaissance masterpiece, outside, the unfinished front of Santo Spirito has no decorations at all unless you count the loopy outline of a baroque refurbishing that was stopped before it did more harm. The people of Florence love the odd facade as a symbol of greatness despite it all. It will never be finished now. Christopher Johnson likes it especially when the warm sunlight floods its surface like a canvas waiting to be painted.
The first canvas in this new show is a Santo Spirito that Johnson had the pleasure of painting and re-painting on two successive visits to Florence: first in 2009, when he left it in the care of friends and then a year later, when he came back and painted on top of it, just as rapidly and broadly as before. The time of year was momentarily colouring the Tuscan plaster with a tone he had to capture. "Any particular color, I asked, thinking 'cream'?" "Yes," he said. "It reminded me of the sun-baked grasslands in Africa when I was growing up." Despite years of admiring Johnsons work, I understood only then that rather than his memoirs of his favourite places, his landscapes were the portraits of particular colours already lodged in his painter's memory.
Johnson was born far away in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, on the eve of its tumultuous passage into modern Zimbabwe, which he witnessed, and much of his life has been passed in travels to and from England and Africa, with stopovers in Italy and Greece. He explains his restless travel as his research for scenes to paint. If Chris Johnson were a poet, instead of a painter, he might just as rightly say it this way: he paints the places, found by chance, that speak to him of his past journeys. Passing in and out of focus like mirages, these are paintings for memory travellers.
Art for him was like this from the beginning. When Johnson was nine, rheumatic fever kept him in bed for six full months. Making drawings began as a break from reading books, and then he discovered he was good at it - and drawing everything in sight was an escape from his confinement. The next year, his (grateful) parents rewarded the boy with a year abroad in England and lots of travels in Europe. He remembers especially the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam - Rembrandt, the most humane of artists, is by definition a good place to start. Later he would discover van Gogh, but for now the die was cast. He knew he was an artist.
School became harder, not easier to negotiate. The available books and materials on art were, well, 'threadbare'. The school library had three volumes on German Expressionism, he still remembers every page: "As soon as I saw their work of nudes in landscape, I knew that this subject would always intrigue me." For his sixteenth birthday, his sympathetic parents gave him a Time-Life series on Art. The book that most intrigued him was the one on the Abstract Expressionists, especially the paintings by Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Interviewed about this recently, he said,
"I knew that I would have to run the line from tight representation to this apparently chaotic but emotionally succinct fervour. This level of work always seemed to be something to aim at. The first time I saw de Kooning's work in person was at a Retrospective in London in the mid- 90's. I don't mind telling you that I wept."
The seventeen or so paintings in this show are the merest sampling of what he has done, and where he has been, in the last three years. The subjects are simply titled, the locales identified, perhaps most of them in this group from the coasts of Scotland, a land he loves for the changing colors of its bracken, which he recognizes as the same heather that paints the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. Other landscapes in the show range from aGloucestershire, where he's lived in recent years, to the East Cape of South Africa, with stopovers to paint the cupola of the cathedral in Florence. Painting journeys beyond time and place is well-suited to a painter named for Christopher, protector of travellers. Pure painting is Chris Johnson's goal, a painting in which each stroke rings clear and true.
John T. Spike
Florence, 15 May 2011
Introduction to Fosse Gallery One-Man Show, 2007, by Mick Rooney
Once the wolves and bears had been banished and it was safe to sit out there in the open air, having got there on foot, horse, carriage, car, train or plane - then thousands of curious travellers began to paint the tamed wilderness calling it landscape'. And so it continues. Invitations pop through the letterbox with tedious regularity. Another landscape exhibition! But is it?
These soothing, charming niceties of Provence, or The Lake District have their place, but what about those so passionate practitioners, that intrepid band who bring the very guts of the landscape to you? One such explorer is Chris Johnson. His work is simply physical. His medium, an alchemical mixture of pigment, oils, oxides and wax, which in the right conditions - 'Temperature' he calls it - emanate, excitement and spirit - the 'Spirit of Place’. As he says: 'When the paint starts to loosen and fly'.
If 'motif’ recalls the impressionist idea, then forget it. Johnson's impastoed paint is more redolent of an 'expressionism’ pinned to an architectural sub-structure. He builds his paint onto quite large canvases right there; on the spot. 'En Pleine Air’.
And back he comes with them to the studio to work on them, to sort through them. ‘There are too many things in the landscape to contemplate whilst one is there. The studio is a dispassionate place where I can be passionate’.
A moment in time is not what he wishes to distil from his work. A 'morning’ painting may become an 'afternoon’ painting. He is always striving to generate the powerful undertone; this perpetual 'Spirit of Place’. His subjects are deceptively uncomplicated and are not dissimilar to those of the worthy grand tourists of the 'safe’ landscape.
Christopher Johnson has thrown his lot in with a tougher tribe who from Van Gogh, Soutine, Sheila Fell or Anne Redpath bear witness to the landscape before them, and more importantly - within them. And with paint stuff they conjure up magical vibrant visions of this illusive 'Spirit of Place’.
Mick Rooney RA Hastings, December 2006