When the Invisible Becomes Visible
The Sydney Morning Herald 3/5/11
Joyce Morgan
On a sodden autumn day, the grey outside the window is a world away from the one within. Canvasses more than two metres high lean against the walls, their shimmering bands of jewel-like colour dwarfing their creator, Michael Johnson, who lights yet another cigarette in the non smoking gallery. “They’re big pictures for an old man,” he says. At 73, Johnson is Australia’s master of abstraction and one of our most prolific painters. “I don’t really think about colour,” he says. Colour is like dealing with energy...you don’t consult your colour wheel. After a while you get a grasp [on it] like the body movement of a dancer.” There is an unstoppable energy about Johnson, as irresponsible as the leaps in his conversation.
Fragments of vivid ideas and anecdotes tumble out: an encounters with Miles Davis at the Blue Note in New York, why a zebra has stripes, how David Hockney once gain him a heater because his London studio was cold, the beauty of a beetles wing. But before he elaborates, he darted off to the next idea.
Johnson has just moved studios and has yet to begin work in his new space , so his latest sties of large painting was completed at his Paddington home. “ I had to take a few doors apart,” he says. The works have been painted in pairs. So for one entitled Low South Light, there’s a companion High North Light. I always do a male and a female painting, a warm, a cool. I always paint in pairs,” he says. “Its like day and night because my paintings are based on the cycles of seasons, the sun, the moon, the tide lifting and dropping. The vibrations you can’t see. Its all about that.”
Invisible vibrations is a theme to which he returns. It is perhaps why when he isn’t painting – he goes fishing, especially at night. “It’s contemplative and you have got to feel what’s going on, you can’t see what’s going on. Its all communicated by touch,” he says.
Communicating by touch was something he imparted to students when, early in his career, he taught art. “The first lesson I would give, I’d blindfold the whole class,” he says. “I’d put on some music they’d never heard before – like pygmy music from Africa – and I’d get them to respond to the music.” Then he’d pin the works on the wall for the students to look at. “I’d say ‘See, we all have out own touch and our own rhythm. That’s the first thing to recognise in yourself.”
The Mosman born Johnson left school at 15 and worked as an illustrator for an advertising agency, Lintas, together with Brett Whiteley and Max Cullen. Understanding the design and layout of pages taught him a vital lesson in composition. “The page itself was the beginning of the importance of the work, not what you put on it. I learned to appreciate the size and the width and height,” he says.
Like many Australian artists of his generation, he sailed to Europe in the 1960’s. In London he shared a house with Whiteley, and encountered such leading British artists as Peter Blake, Hockney and Joe Tilson, before moving to New York in the 1970’s. There he saw works by two American artists who made an enduring impact on him: the scenic painter Milton Avery and Albert Pinkham Ryder, known for moody seascapes.
Over the past year, Johnson has been contemplating the body of work he has created over more than half a century of creativity, including his drawings. “I’ve got all the drawings I’ve ever done in my life in filing cabinets,” he says. He hopes to exhibit some of them next year. Meanwhile, a new studio full of blank canvases awaits. And he has no shortage of inspiration. “Something comes about every day that stirs you up into some sort of excitement and joy of being around and experiencing. Something you couldn’t predict. It’s all invisible, becoming visible,” he says.
Michael Johnson’s new works are at Tim Olsen Gallery, Woollahra, from tomorrow.