Air and Water, Paintings by Nancy Johnson at Shoreline Community College Art Gallery

Painting by Nancy Johnson

The College Gallery at Shoreline Community College is pleased to present “Air and Water,” paintings by Nancy Johnson November 1 – December 30, 2011.

Johnson has been painting the interaction between figures, landscape, and water for 40 years. She has found the stark landscape where land ends and sea begins to be an uncluttered arena in which the simplest event can take on theatrical focus; where little moments that would be lost in a busier environment become cleanly delineated. In the water, next to it, or seen from a distance, life on a beach presents a feast of image opportunities. This show will include oil on canvas, works on paper, and watercolor from the 1980s to the present.

Johnson is a painter whose nuanced understanding of color and light is unique, especially in the Seattle arts scene. She was with the Linda Ferris Gallery during the emergence of Pioneer Square as the hippest place to be in the 1980’s and her work was part of the figurative revival that included Randy Hayes, Norie Sato, Sherry Markovitz, and Faye Jones, among others. Her dedication to painterly realism was described by Deloris Tarzan in the March 1980 Seattle Times review of Johnson’s show, “Nature is depicted in a straightforward manner, with…the paint surface itself as literal as the subject…she never labors for effect.” After Linda Ferris closed, Johnson exhibited regularly with Foster White Gallery until its sale in 2002. She has not only an accomplished painter but also collaborated with her husband, Bill as an aviation photographer, graphic designer and illustrator.

The College Gallery is located near the main entrance to the college on the south end of campus in the 1000 Building. Gallery hours are 9-5, Monday through Friday. Parking and pay stations are nearby. The college is located at 16101 Greenwood Avenue North, west of Aurora Avenue and just north of Seattle city limits.

Artist Statement: Nancy Johnson

When I was a young painter, I tried on styles like hats, keeping bits of some and tossing the rest. As time passed, I noticed some patterns emerging. One was a surprising penchant for realism, a direction I had previously dismissed as “retro”, and the other, a subject-matter fascination with the world at the water’s edge. The stark landscape where land ends and sea begins had fed my fantasies and delighted my eyes since I was nine and first stood at the edge of the Pacific. It seemed natural to be drawn there in my paintings.

Like the sagebrush-covered country around my Idaho birthplace, this is space pared to its bare essentials: earth/water, horizon/sky -- an uncluttered arena in which to stage the sort of human tableau that most interested me. Against this setting the simplest of events take on theatrical focus. Little moments that would be lost in a busier environment become cleanly delineated. For a realist painter, which I realized I was becoming in spite of my training, life on a beach presented a feast of image opportunities.

In later years I have moved more and more into and beneath the water, and the multiple figures I had been using have been reduced to a single bather -- almost always me. I am still surprised, after a lifetime of trying to subjectively paint a particular kind of objective reality, that I have gone the way I have, but it is what I see, and what I care about.