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The Hot Seat
The Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald 16 May 2009
Elissa Blake
Michael Johnson is rummaging in his back trouser pocket. “I have some rocks in here,” he says, pulling them out and unfolding his palm. A cluster of river stones sits in his hand. He gives one to me and one to the photographer. “They are for luck. Hold them in your hands,” he says stuffing his own hand back in his pocket. “I'll keep mine in here.”
The smooth black stones are from Cornwall, he says. “The tide goes in and out, washing and cleansing and massaging. That’s all of life right there.”
Talking to Michael Johnson, Australia’s leading abstract artist for almost four decades, is like a dance moving in slow and sudden circles. He never quite answers a question but what he does say is peppered with 100 years of art history, a smattering of evolutionary biology, a hint of mathematics and a great deal of music. He touches on everything from volcanos, Buddha, pomegranates, bamboo soup, and painters from Rothko (“he went so deep into the colour, people wept”) to Turner (“anybody who straps himself to a mast in a storm is committed!”).
“I’m an abstract artist. I think in an abstract way. That’s why I’m so hard to talk to,” he explains, chuckling. At 71, Johnson is a wiry man with “neglected hair” who talks either emphatically or under his breath. He laughs a lot and smokes continuously. He is both charming and wary. “I don’t want to talk too much art talk; puts people off,” he says. “But not too much Readers Digest stuff either. My personal life is sacred, save that for the biography.”
Edmund Capon, director of the Art Gallery of NSW, says Johnson is “elliptical”. “He talks and talks. He’s no shrinking violet. I’m surprised the interview ever ended,” he says, adding that he once bumped into Johnson saying “aren’t you supposed to be in Bali?” Johnson said he missed the plane because he got carried away in conversation.
“That’s what he’s like. He’s a robust, boisterous person who likes to grab life by the scruff of the neck,” says Capon. “And his work is truly a reflection of him. The paintings demand attention. They are a visual symphony. All those straggly lines are filled with his thoughts, experiences and feelings. He’s a very emotional person and the intensity of emotion is squeezed out of the tube and onto the canvas.”
Johnson is about to have his first exhibition at the Tim Olsen Gallery after the Sherman Galleries, his home for 15 years, closed last year. The works are in his signature large scale and filled with layers and lines of rich colour. They look spontaneous but the work is underpinned by a mathematical method with each section of the painting measured in counts or bars, like a piece of music.
Johnson’s daughter Anna says his process is disciplined and ordered. “I love to picture him like [jazz trumpeter] Miles Davis with a million notes in his head except the notes are colour. He can pluck them from what looks like mid-air but is actually a very deep reservoir of memory,” she says.
Johnson himself describes his work as “near polyphonic”. Working on two paintings at a time over a period of three months, he starts with a brush (always a brand new one to keep the colour clean) and slowly builds an emotional mood with “chords of colour”. “Then I overpaint with a palette knife and draw with the tubes of paint. I try to keep this layering open and avoid a formula. I never do the same painting twice. The unexpected gives me more latitude for intuition.”
He says the new works were inspired by thoughts of the subterranean: an underground cavern filled with water, a whale shark he saw swimming in Broome or a bioluminescent fish he spotted in the pages of National Geographic (“their eyes generate light when they open or close them, confusing their predators; you can see them from the moon”).
“I’m inspired by phenomena like the refraction on a beetle’s wing or the colours of the night sky. My eyes are open all the time,” he says. “With all my paintings I am trying to freeze my experiences. I’m trying to represent the times I lived in. I’m so excited by living on this planet.”
Born in 1938, the eldest son of eight children, Johnson grew up in Mosman exploring rock pools with his brothers and catching lobsters at Balmoral. Both his parents were artists. His father Frank Johnson was an illustrator at The Sun and his mother Beatrice, a fashion designer and painter of wild flowers with a passion for the art of Vincent van Gogh. At 14, he left school to work for the advertising agency Lintas alongside Tony McGillick, Max Cullen and Brett Whiteley, becoming inseparable from the latter, the pair heading off every weekend to paint in the bush together.
In his twenties he travelled through Europe, meeting up with Brett and Wendy Whiteley in Florence and sharing a house with them back in London. “Michael was living downstairs and Brett and I were upstairs. I’d go to work at Harvey Nichols and come home to find they’d been up to all sorts of things while I was out. I’d be furious and have to clean everything up!” says Wendy Whiteley, adding that both painters were very ambitious and set their goals high.
“Michael was young, lean and hungry. He was very hardworking, trying to find his feet and his style. He still is hardworking. I’ve always admired his persistence and hunger,” she says. “He could also be very bohemian and a real pain in the arse, or he could be quite brilliant. I love the old bugger.”
In London, Johnson married Margo Farrelly – they have been married for 48 years now - and had two children, Matthew, who has become a painter, and Anna, an author. He worked odd jobs, taught art and painted at night. He hung out with British artists David Hockney, Peter Blake and Joe Tilson at Henneky’s Pub.
But in 1967 he returned to Sydney for two years before heading to New York where all the fashionable art was “plugged in”. It was the era of video installations and slide projectors. Nevertheless, in the six years the Johnson family lived there, he produced five solo exhibitions. But Johnson’s yearning for the swampy greens of the bush and the light of his childhood lured him back to Sydney. Since then, hardly a year has gone by without an exhibition and he has been named the most collectible artist in Australia. His most famous work After Sirius hangs in the Art Gallery of NSW. Other works reside in museums, boardrooms and private collections around the world.
At home in his Pyrmont warehouse, surrounded by burnt down candles, teetering piles of art books and scattered CDs of music from around the world, Johnson says he has many more paintings to come. “There are so many I hardly have time to do them all. Every night I go to sleep thinking about painting and I wake up thinking about it. I never put the hammer down, I'm chained to it,” he says. “I do get tired though. There is a pain to painting, my brain is always working.”
In his downstairs studio, six trestle tables are covered with hundreds of squeezed and twisted tubes of paint, all with the lids off. “I use a chopstick to poke a hole in them to get more paint out,” he explains, putting on a CD of Pakistani music. “When I’m nervous I like to put on something rhythmic, it gets the blood flowing. Painting is like a dance. I have to keep pace with the lines and the marks. Sometimes I freeze and spend hours contemplating, feeling blank. But then the best things come.”
Johnson admits abstract painting can be a very elusive art form for a newcomer to appreciate. “All art is abstract because it's art. You have to slow down in front of a painting. It's not an instantaneous hit. It's not heroin or a glass of whiskey. People who are genuinely interested in art keep looking until the penny drops,” he says, adding that most of his collectors keep his paintings in the family rather than selling them again on the market.
Johnson has a wild man reputation in art circles but he dismisses questions about it. “All artists have a wild reputation because they are insecure and competitive. All of us have dark side otherwise we wouldn’t be human. I’m actually very affectionate and forgivable,” he says smiling. “I look for the positive side of life.”
He says he’s been a decent father (“being an artist is not always reliable but it’s all about affection) and he’s enjoying being a grandfather to two boys (“it’s demanding, I have to build bows and arrows”). He will never retire from painting but he sometimes feels tired and wants to move to a quieter neighbourhood with a “dipping pool, a herb garden and sunlight on my body every day.”
Thirty minutes later, over a seafood lunch, Johnson suddenly says, “I've forgotten to tell you something really important, Humphrey Bogart always said 'get your feet right first'. That's so important. I always plant my feet before I start painting. Even when I'm on the ladder I get my feet right first.
“And another thing. It's important to stay physically fit. I'm always doing something physical whether it's painting or fishing or building a house or demolishing a building. You must stay physically fit.”
The conversation continues circling and it seems possible it could go on into the night. But it has to end. As I walk away from the cafe, I realise I've left my river stone on the coffee table. The weight of it is still in my palm, but somehow the stone has slipped through my fingers.
Michael Johnson's exhibition of new works opens at the Tim Olsen Gallery on May 19.