Robert J. Johnson: a sample of 1994 work

These are images taken from PhotoCD of some paintings my father, Robert J. Johnson did last year. My father is a classically trained fine artist and educator, schooled in the Bauhaus tradition. He attended the Chicago Art Institute for undergrad and did his graduate work at the Institute of Design at IIT. He taught commercial art at CVS in Chicago for over 25 years, and was the Director of Curriculum, Bureau of Art, for the city of Chicago for over 5 years. He retired a few years ago to devote himself full time to painting and sculpture.

In my opinion, my father has always been happy with his experiments in form, but not terribly satisfied with his first color choices. I've seen him take the same form and reconstruct it in a variety of media (drawing, painting, wood sculpture, styrofoam, etc.); always toying with the surface properties and the color interrelationships. The original form always seem to move through the media relatively unscathed, but the color and material properties always underwent startling transformations.

For many years, my dad and I talked about the computer and its role with respect to the artist. "I don't need an electric pencil, Michael" my dad would say. "The one I've got works fine. Give me a different kind of tool; then we'll talk."

It wasn't that he wasn't keen on technology; he just wasn't interested in it unless it could bring something new to his creative process. Finally, a confluence of events:

Apple release the Centris line (reasonably priced 68040 based machines)
PhotoCD was becoming accessible
Postscript printers were closing in on the $1K mark

caused me to finally recommend to my dad that he purchase a computer. He agreed, and plunked down around $4 or $5K for a nicely tricked out Centris 610, 16 bit color, 24MB, 250MB drive, double speed internal CD-ROM, Syquest external drive, and an Apple Select 310 Postscript printer. He also bought a bunch of software: Word, FreeHand, PageMaker, PhotoShop.

My father always photographed his and his students work; he's a pretty scrupulous record keeper. I convinced him to put a set of slides on PhotoCD so he could view and manipulate his paintings on the computer. He dinked around with the machine for a few months, but then one holiday when I was home we hit on a process that struck home. One night I was showing my father what you could in PhotoShop by manipulating the color. Pretty standard stuff for a CG weenie like me, but every 5 seconds my dad was going ooh! oooh! oh!...

Immediately my dad wanted to know if we could print some of these out. "Well, yea, but dad, you do realize you've only got a black and white printer; and even if it was color, it's not gonna look like that..." He didn't care; he was interested in the value changes, and the colors were in his head and waiting in a tube back in his studio anyway. He took the printouts of the images and went back in his studio. He mounted the print out on some backing and started painting the pictures he'd seen in his head when he saw those images on the screen. In a short amount of time (scads shorter than it took him to do the original painting), he had a bunch of different color studies. Of course, the original painting had been several feet on a side and these pieces were half of a sheet of paper; but this change in scale was also interesting.

In addition to the scale issue and the obvious color issues, he has since worked the smaller pieces into connected series (see img0029), and in others used wax and other substances to obscure parts (see img0034). Anyway, I hope you enjoy these; I'll be putting more here as I get time. If you have comments, my dad would love to hear from you: you can send him mail at BigCrayola@aol.com (weird logins run in the family - but he gets that particular trait from me...).

In the following images, I've grouped the ones that came from the same source together. If there is more than one, usually the original painting is one of them. Click on the images to get at a higher resolution version of the image. For your own sake, only click there if you have the bandwidth...

Finally, please respect my father's copyright on these images. If you have some real need to reproduce these images, plesae contact my father direct, don't just take the image. This is a gallery, not a copy shop. If you like what you see here, send my dad mail, engage him in some discourse about the work. That's the only price of admission; think about what you see here; form a reasoned opinion, express it in an intelligent manner. I hope you enjoy this work as much as I do. I'm excited about the possibilities of sharing artist's works in progress this way, I think it might stimulate new and interesting possibilities for collaboration.

Robert J. Johnson: a sample of 1994 work

copyright 1994 Robert J. Johnson. All rights reserved