It’s Day 206 and I found today’s artist on artsy.net as well.  I’m really enjoying that site.  Tonight is my first improv show with my new group, The Incidentalists and I’m excited and a little nervous so I wanted to get my blog and painting done a little earlier so that I could get other things done today before just being anxious.  Haha.  Join me in honoring Keith Johnston today.  I wish I would’ve bought an encaustic board to do this painting on, but that’s okay.  I also for the life of me could not find a portrait of him anywhere, so please forgive me for that.

Keith Johnston’s minimalist works are spare, tonal arrangements of light and dark forms, with tentative whispers of drawings. He conceives the work on wood panel in encaustic, which is often scraped and reapplied, and then adds graphite. There are no preliminary sketches.

He wants “to see the marking’s of the artist’s hand, the process of spontaneity, the

economy—where subtlety, pitch, line or blocking, with the slightest of movement, can completely alter the work.”

The simplicity of his paintings reflects this vision by the inherent significance attached to each line, shape or form, given the minimalist quality of the work. His choice to use black and white intensifies the importance of line, form and composition as the central components of the painting.

As stated by Jean McCartney, Director of Calvin Klein, Inc., “Johnston’s work relies upon

evoking emotions and feeling, related not only to what appears on canvas—but as important, what he chooses to leave out.” In minimalist work such as Johnston’s, the void created by the absence of extraneous colors, lines, and details is equally significant in generating the ultimate feeling expressed by the piece. He aims to “convey a kind of energy … [that] this intensity will transmit to the viewer.”

Johnston lived and traveled extensively in Europe following his formal education, which he says “threw open my soul to the ultimate, living, breathing art history book, to take in daily, to feed on and digest.”

This experience served as inspiration for him to develop a painting style that can be seen as a precursor to his current minimalist work. His early paintings were in a figurative tradition, but at the millennium he decided that a new century required “a new outlook: back to drawing, back to basics, back to black and white.”

Johnston received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1980. He first

exhibited his paintings in New York City in 1995.

Biography above is from artresourceboston.com.

I hope you enjoy my piece today and I’ll see you tomorrow on Day 207!

Best,

Linda