Erick Johnson
“What has long inspired me is the interplay between color and form. Each work starts from a neutral beginning, developing a deeper particularity that evokes a resonance of place, feeling and memory. Irregular polygons, slotted together imperfectly, are my building blocks, which result in slivers of white ground, suggesting movement and mutability.
The surface is scraped, dragged, rubbed and layered, leaving the painting process visible.
The colors are compound layers of different pigments and hues. I combine the colors into arrangements and combinations, akin to musical chords. My process begins analytically and ends intuitively as color and its effects are not reducible to logic.”
Erick Johnson's abstract paintings explore the synergy between color and form. Irregular shapes stack and slide together, building walls of reverberating color, separated by narrow white passages that create the illusion of forms suspended in space.
Using handmade tools, Johnson pulls paint across the surface in layered passes. Opaque and translucent bands play against each other, creating rhythm and movement. Some shapes settle into place like masonry; others teeter on their neighbors. As Hovey Brock wrote in the Brooklyn Rail, "Johnson is above all a colorist, and the way he bends the hues of his glazed tints like the notes in a blues guitarist's solo shows mastery."
Born in 1959 in San Francisco, Erick Johnson received his MFA from Bard College in 2005 and has shown publicly for more than twenty years in the United States and abroad. He has had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and has had a solo exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. He lives and works in New York City and is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts with two locations in New York City.