ABOUT

When discussing his film “Belfast” director Kenneth Branagh talked about his intention to evoke the way we filter our own personal experience through imaginative encounters with other stories.

In our lives films act as a super-stimulus; the images populate our thoughts and memories informing our own self-constructed realities. This project explores the ways in which images and memory mediated through the medium of film are reciprocally processed through the medium of oil paint. Through painting, the aim of this project is embody this tension between memory and visual reality.

The works are not meant to be literal re-creations, but rather emotional translations. Each panel is a specific cinematic moment, reimagined and reinterpreted through a personal lens. The decision to paint on wax paper is intentional: the surface allows the background surface to filter through, lending each piece a sense of impermanence. Like the flicker of a film projector or the way a film scene can burn into memory, these works offer a sense of transition, as if caught between states of being. The wax paper’s semi-transparency suggests the fragility of recollection, while the live edge and alla-prima application of paint evokes the emotions and textures that remain long after the original image fades.

Lee Johnson graduated from New College of Florida. He studied with Betty Lou Totten in Florida, Leo Neufeld in New Mexico, and at the atelier of Charles Cecil in Florence, Italy where he taught for four years. He lives in Saxapahaw, NC.

www.johnsonstudio.net

www.instagram.com/leejohnsonart

lee@johnsonstudio.net

Education

1985-1987 Betty Lou Totten, DFACC, Dunedin, FL

1987-1991 New College, Sarasota, FL

1995-1997 Leo Neufeld, Albuquerque, NM

1997-2000 Charles H. Cecil Studios, Florence, Italy

Grants & Awards

1987 Freida Turner Memorial Grant

1990 Women's Exchange Continuing Education Grant

1998 Camille Claudel Foundation Grant