A ring of hefty paint cans on the floor confronted me upon walking into the Ezra Johnson show at the Freight & Volume Gallery on Lispenard. A deft Duchampian touch, I felt upon departure. So wrong. “They are made of cardboard,” Johnson would tell me later. “There’s a little papier mache … some plaster, resin. They’re pretty mixed up. I think partially they come across as real because you wouldn’t think to fake something like that.” It was a strong intro to a strong show. The working model of an art career has usually been that the artist will develop a signature style, work his or her way through it until it’s exhausted, then evolve another or even – Hi, Pablo! – several. That’s not Johnson’s way. In such canvases as Red River and Hoses, for instance, he unleashes a recognisably jungly background, whereas in Green Drive he seems to renders such greenery as abstract art.
Would he accept this I asked, on a call to him at home in Tampa, Florida. “I think so,” Johnson said. “I’ve been living down here in the tropics for ten years now. And I try to find painterly ways of capturing the lush vegetation. And in Green Drive you can’t see all the detail anyway if you’re in a car. I saw it little bit as a fauvist simplification. Like an early Matisse way of summarizing all that complexity. In that one it really worked for me.” But just replicating such a success doesn’t work for Johnson. “For example Green Drive, I couldn’t repeat it,” he said. “I tried to do it again and I just can’t quite pull it off. It has to be singular.”
Green Drive is hung next to another striking painting of an automobile: Upside Down. “I actually saw a car tip over,” Johnson says. “Right in front of my eyes. It wasn’t even going very fast. It made me feel like I was watching a movie. It seriously felt like slow motion, this car flipping over in the air …like I saw every frame of an animation of it …and the crashing down …it was really surreal, the craziest thing … “
So fate can gift Ezra Johnson with subject matter but most of his canvases, he says, are generated by his daily life. In Who Are You the subject was his wife, Susanna. ”I first painted her in a very straightforward way,” he told me. “But then it sort of combined with things from my feelings or imagination. I guess that the approach I have taken lately is that I’ll begin in a very direct way from life, even sometimes plein air. And then I’ll rework them in the studio …sometimes change the colors around and overpaint them and kind of unlock things … ‘
I remarked upon the number of different ways of paint handling on the canvas, Red River. “One can work on them for a long time,” Johnson said. “Very few of them are done in even three sittings, I’ll sort of try different things. And I don’t stop until I feel like it.” How long had he worked on Red River? “I work on many,” he said. “I’ll look at it … I see it there … But I had that one going for a couple years.”
Ezra Johnson’s titles make one think. The wall of 21 paintings of small houses in his home-town, Tampa, for instance, is collectively called Monsters Live In Your Head. “It’s the land of single family homes,” he said. “I sort of feel that each person gets their armor out for protection in their own little space. I’m not criticizing that. It’s natural, beautiful too. I feel a combination of objectivity and subjectivity. Especially in that. But I think it’s in all the work.”
