Abstract Expressionist Artist

Biography

Cheryl Johnson is a Kauai and Charlotte NC based Contemporary Artist


SEE SITE: cheryljohnsonartist.com

 Cheryl Lynn Johnson (born February 12, 1947) is an American abstract expressionist artist. Johnson was born in Kellogg, Idaho. She studied at Oklahoma State University. BA and MFA. Retired from a prolific and innovative career with IBM.

Her paintings are expansive, often covering two separate panels. Landscape and seascape are the primary influence on her subject matter. She paints on unprimed canvas or white ground with gestural, autonomous brushwork. Her paintings are highly expressive and emotional.

"It isn’t just all about space and color, it is the edges, where paint meets. Do I bring it up close and stop or push it over the edge of the next color?"

Signature calligraphic marks and intimate areas of detail are extraordinary: the paint flung and squeezed on to the canvases, spilling and spluttering across their surfaces and smeared on with the artist's fingers.

LESSISMORE INTIMATEIMMENSITY

Cheryl maintains a preference for stillness but is drawn to movement. Johnson's works with their sheer density of layers endlessly receding are an almost archaeological revealing of the history of their painstaking progression from blank canvas to luminous object.

"Rain. I found a day in the midst of a week just looking out my window at the rain."

‘I spend half my time closely observing the natural world. The other half I spend in the studio, attempting to translate this experience into two-dimensional form. I am always drawn to the minutiae detail exposing the evolution of form and work to not fill the canvas with detail but, to let space speak. Intimate Immensity, fragility,  color, and light are what interest me.

Cheryl Johnson's work is characterized by the subtle handling of the medium.  The imagery appears to be reduced to essentials and allows mind spaces to be opened up. The observer is drawn in, visually challenged, perception is sharpened, without the paintings giving up all their secrets. A distinctive, moving aesthetic that conveys extreme emotions through vivid and often dissonant colors.

Cheryl Johnson's brand of Abstract Expressionism, emphasizes spontaneous creation and emotional intensity. Her work is a process of evolution, bordering between abstraction, the conceptual and the figurative. Her palette, muted subtle colors. She uses the blackest and palest of shades to bathe her work in luminous light and shadow. The effect is brooding and nebulous, yet meditative.

Johnson'’s works are hard to typify. They range from abstracts with large washes of color to gestural, fleshy nudes, figurative studies— but they all showcase his wide-ranging vocabulary and dynamism in creation.