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From the Heart
The Sydney Morning Herald 07/05/11
John McDonald
Despite contrasting views of the world, two artists find common ground by putting emotion before technique, writes John McDonald.
The conundrum of how to express one’s thoughts and feelings in a way that doesn’t become illustrative or didactic lies at the heart of abstract art. Many artists consider abstraction to be a logical progression, believing that once they have crossed the lines that separates them from strictly representational art there is no turning back. This made it doubly startling last week to see Michael Johnson’s extraordinary drawing of a snow leopard completes as part of last year’s artist’s project at Taronga Park Zoo. Anybody who ever suspected abstract artists cant draw would be dumbfounded at the skill show here in a masterful use of brush and ink. There are no snow leopards in Johnson’s new exhibition at the Tim Olsen Gallery, but the memory puts these large abstract paintings into perspective. His canvases are luminous and often beautiful but only with the merest hint of landscape to spoil their claims to be non-objective. The decorative qualities of these works are inextricably bound up with their expressive, emotional qualities. One always gets a clear sense of Johnson’s mood from the overall tonality of an exhibition. While his previous show has a darker aspect, the best of these new pictures are exuberant.
This partly reflects a relief at having come through a long period of ill health and upheaval. More fundamentally, it reveals Johnson as an optimist and a natural painter. He is one of those people for whom painting contains an entire universe, with all its high and lows, moments of melancholy and inspiration. Unlike Martinez Celaya, Johnson wont be found with a volume of Hegel in his hand, but he is just as susceptible to the appeal of an eccentric genius such as Albert Pinkham Ryder. Johnson may be no less excited by the colours and patterns of Indonesian textiles or by an underwater photograph of a coral reef. He is a connoisseur of visual sensations, which are translated into rhythmic arrangements of colour n paintings such as Qing Jifu/ Empress – a work with a buoyancy and a sense of infinite space that is positively memeric. Other pictures strike different chords, but the same play of deep and shallow space, the same undulating loops of oil paint squeezed directly from the tube, the same mixture of textures applies in every instance. What impresses most is the rigorous control that Johnson exercises over his compositions. Large areas of dark hue are skilfully balanced by dabs of bright, high keyed colour. Different segments of a picture are linked by subtle echoes and repetitions. There is a strong sense of the natural world in these works but nobody has told Johnson that nature is in malign revolt In the boldness of his palette, he is determined not to mourn by to celebrate.