Brunel, 2014, Michael Johnson
Oil on canvas
Provenance: Mossgreen, Melbourne.
Michael Johnson grew up surrounded by art; both his parents were painters and there were framed prints of Vermeer and Albert Pinkham Ryder hanging on the walls of his childhood home in Mosman. Unlike other Australian artists who found international success through figurative and semi abstracted landscape Johnson’s European experience distilled his love of colour, space and form into highly distilled abstract works.
His purpose was to eliminate recognizable imagery in favor of abstraction and to build a unique fusion between architectonics, sculpture and painting. Many things triggered his inspiration: his appreciation of form, the colours on bird feathers, and the reflecting metallic hot-rod colours on beetle wing covers. The symmetrical patterns on butterfly wings, leaves, mammals, reptiles, fish bones and birds eggs, everything was absorbed, remembered and used in his art. Colour and light have remained a lifelong preoccupation and Johnson links every major shift and phase of his work to natural influences. (1)