GEORGE & PHYLLIS JOHANSON

Much influenced by Life magazine, I thought when I fell in with Bob Scriver that I was joining a sort of group like the abstract expressionists in the Manhattan village.  I wasn’t.  The Montana cowboy artists were quite different from each other and didn’t really gel as a group until the CMR Auction began to assemble them every March.  So when I became an animal control officer back in Portland, OR, after Bob divorced me, and then became a friend and co-conspirator with Phyllis Johanson, one of the most dedicated of animal rescuers, I was delighted to meet her husband George.  Right now George is in the middle of a great celebration of his work and Phyllis sent me a booklet containing his work plus an interview. 

I should probably scatter the art work through the blog, but I’m going to put them together so you can compare them.

“Daub” (detail)  1958    

“Portrait of Gretchen Corbett”  1979

“Beach Follies” 2009

When I was around George, he was painting in the style of the beach scene.  I kidded Tim that his dog Jack in the little white dog on the left and Isabella is in the foreground on the right.  I should have said that it was Tim putting on his swim fins with a boy helping him.  But the truth is that George makes icons or motifs of his own friends and neighbors, plus his version of bits of famous classical paintings.  For a long time there was a rabbit haunting almost every painting.  He’s quite eloquent about how and why he does this.  Phyllis shows up, as well as her long succession of rescue cats, often leaping Dali-style across the picture plane.  The Johanson house is at the edge of woods and when Phyllis goes for a walk up the trail, whatever cats are resident always go along with her in a long single file with their tails straight up in the air.  I used to follow along at the end of the row.

George and Phyllis have compatible temperaments that illustrate one end of the way artists can be, quite the opposite of the stormy near-psychotic alcoholics and ear-cutters we hear about.  (BOTH are valid.)  George often does prints, very exacting and precise work that takes enormous concentration and time.  One morning their son, Aaron, very young and used to working alongside his father, woke early and went into the studio alone.  By the time George got up, Aaron had made his own crayoned additions to everything George had in process.  After George had recovered from the first shock, he willingly “gave up” both the work and the outrage.  Then, Quaker, pacifist, he got interested in what Aaron thought he was adding, how his mind worked.  (Aaron developed into a fine photographer.  These photos are his.)

The early art community in Portland formed around the Portland Art Museum School. (Now the Pacific Northwest College of Art.  http://www.pnca.edu/)   George and friends taught there, which might be part of the reason he can explain what he does.  In the detail from an abstract still-life called “Daub” he points out,  “You get the wall plane of red back there and the floor plane of light blue-green and then the pillars of the table and a kind of jumble of things on the table.”  But the original source is “simply information about where the forms came from, because I think the paintings stand on their own as forces of color and movements and senses of volume and so on, without having to pin them down to a subject such as a still life.  One of my abstract expressionist paintings might be a forest, or it might not be anything specific.  It might be a range of emotions, a statement about emotion.”

I included the portrait of one of the grande dames of Portland to show George’s realistic side.  

But here’s the quote I love best:  “The wonderful thing about painting for me is that it is a sensual expression of the outside world.  I’ve always loved juicy paint in one way or another.  And, if we look at the early paintings from New York, they all have a sense of the deliciousness of the paint, I think.  It’s the sensuousness of paint that compels me, I guess.”

George is incorrigibly optimistic in an intelligent way and from that comes both his and Phyllis’ relentless determination to make things better.  He sees something that I see, which is that the GI Bill that put so many mature but young men into universities had a transformative effect on a lot of things.  They visited the art departments as part of humanities educations and got caught up in enthusiasm.  Even if they didn’t become professional artists, their understanding was much greater.  George feels that was the beginning of a kind of flowering into the supportive audience that art needs in order to survive.

George says,  “My theme is that art is the most important thing in the world and all the rest of what we do is just maintenance.”  “Art in its broadest terms is what we’re really here for, to be creative.  To make something and look at the world and to interpret it through art is the highest activity of human beings.”

And he says (This is where I am with writing!!),  “I think it’s that you don’t know what else is in there that you can bring out.  You don’t know what else there is about you that you’ve got that you can bring out and make a painting out of, and yet it seems to keep coming.  And the more you do, the more that one thing leads to another thing, which leads to two more ideas.  And the thing that I find about working is that working tends to solve a lot of questions about where you’re going, and what you can do and why you’re doing it.”

Rainier Maria Rilke said that artists build their art using the tools and instruments of their lives.  In George’s case that means curiosity, patience, community, generosity, abiding love, family, and juicy paint.

George is represented by Augen Gallery in Portland, OR.  http://www.augengallery.com/  This interview I’m quoting was by Barry Pelzer.