Brett Allen Johnson | Full of Possibility

Brett Allen Johnson reinterprets the American Southwest

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

This story was featured in the August 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art August 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

“I ADORE A white canvas because it’s still full of possibility,” says Utah artist Brett Allen Johnson. This ability to look ahead with imaginative determination has sustained his creative vision and brought him to the forefront of the contemporary Southwest art arena. Primarily a landscape painter, Johnson approaches every outdoor encounter and every new studio session with the same outlook—as a tabula rasa waiting to be discovered and reinterpreted from his unique contemporary viewpoint.

Johnson lives and works in his native Utah with his wife and four children. He has spent most of his life in his home state and the surrounding Southwest, where he feels an earnest kinship with the land. He has always harbored a deep affection for the region’s panoramic vistas, an interest first roused on family road trips to visit his grandparents in Sedona, AZ. Likewise, Johnson felt compelled to draw beginning at an early age. It seemed only natural that he would combine these two passions—someday.

After high school, Johnson attended a local community college, where he enrolled in the graphic-design program. He painted on the side during this time, working in an abstract style. But after two years of taking design classes, Johnson had an experience that would prove seminal in his life as an artist and a professional.

In 2010, he visited the Brigham Young University Museum of Art and saw the exhibition Wide-Open Spaces: Capturing the Grandeur of the American Southwest, which featured nearly 100 paintings by Maynard Dixon, James Swinnerton, Birger Sandzén, and other 20th-century artists painting the intense landscape of the American Southwest. Captivated by the show, Johnson returned multiple times during its 18-month run. He found the artwork beguiling, and it inspired him to take his own painting pursuit in a different direction. “That’s the one [thing] that really showed me what was possible in the Southwest—the marriage of light, form, clarity, and bold graphic power,” says Johnson of this pivotal encounter. “It really spoke to me in that I saw painters who had a strong abstract sense. They were real designers. I saw them using the same sunlight and things that I love.”

Ultimately, Wide-Open Spaces helped Johnson realize his interest in fusing abstracted elements with realistic depiction. He decided to shift his creative focus from pure abstraction to his contemporary vision of the landscape. It had such a profound impact on him, in fact, that after experiencing the show he dropped out of college and changed his career path in pursuit of becoming a landscape painter.

A RELATIVE newcomer to the Southwestern art scene, Johnson has had a remarkable professional trajectory. Self-taught as a landscape painter, he began exhibiting his work by participating in a few juried shows and posting pieces on social media. His career was quickly catapulted forward after he caught the eye of gallery owner Beau Alexander on Instagram. In what the artist calls “the opportunity of a lifetime,” Alexander contacted Johnson after viewing his work, and Johnson joined the stable of artists at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles in 2016. “He’s been a friend and a confidante,” Johnson says of Alexander, who has served as both art representative and mentor. “To have the feeling that you have somebody who believes in what you’re doing, and is able to gently nudge it in the right direction sometimes, has been really helpful for me. It’s had a huge effect.”

Johnson’s personal history with the Southwest has played a significant role in his painting practice as well, and his penchant for effectively conceptualizing the visual and emotional aspects of the region’s unique light, heat, and air quality speaks to that. “Sometimes when you’re in your formative years there are certain things that make a big impression, form a part of who you are,” says Johnson. “I think a lot of our drives and hikes in Arizona did that for me. So I always come back to the Southwest.”

A student of history, Johnson adheres to Baroque and rococo ideas about light, employing it not only to illuminate but also to amplify. With heady juxtapositions of tonal and contrasting palettes, he highlights abstracted shapes with well-defined edges to reinforce the “grand, solid forms” that appear in his work. “There’s a certain order to the light,” he says of the Southwest. “It’s really heightened here.”

As a rule, Johnson doesn’t copy directly from nature and often invents entire landscapes on the canvas. Nevertheless, he relies on his plein-air experiences to inspire the colors, light, and shapes in his paintings. He finds it important to periodically go to the source, to surround himself with the landscape and connect with it on physical, intellectual, and spiritual terms. “If you don’t get out in it, you lose sight of it,” he says.

To that end, the artist makes several regional expeditions each year, exploring the wilds of southern Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico. He drives and hikes, photographing and sketching along the way. Other times he leaves his tools behind, preferring to take in the scenery without any distractions. “There’s no substitute for breathing the dry desert air,” says Johnson. “It helps keep me focused, and ideas flow much more freely out there.” His treks, therefore, become an undiluted dialogue between artist and subject.

BEFORE JUMPING into life as a full-time artist, Johnson worked as a carpenter for 16 years, honing his painting practice on nights and weekends. His time working in construction has impacted his fine-art career, he says, by giving him the confidence to work with his hands and to realize a project from beginning to end. Certainly, the visual planning and construction of a composition on canvas shares similarities with building a three-dimensional structure. Like carpentry, Johnson’s painting process is somewhat structured, in that he has a vision of the finished piece before he takes brush to surface. While some details may change as he works, the artist invariably formulates the composition’s blueprint from the outset.

For Johnson, the Southwest landscape is the ideal vehicle to blend traditional and contemporary aesthetics. He embraces the established Southwest genre in his reverence for the limitless spaces, open skies, and stunning land formations that populate the area. However, he presents such subject matter with a decidedly modern sensibility that manifests in a reduction of detail and a special attention to materials. Vibrant hues and dramatic contrasts bring each scene to life—its innate wonder revealed not so much in the forms themselves as in the visual elements and materials that define and document them.

This pointed focus on paring down a complex scene to its most essential colors and shapes creates an almost surreal atmosphere that pushes naturalism to the brink of a hyperreal state, then pulls it back just enough to maintain that sense of history and grandeur indicative of the storied landscape. “I definitely want to have the distinct feeling of the region,” Johnson says. In doing this, he constantly walks the tightrope between naturalism and stylization, striving to push the envelope while also preserving the reality that connects people to each specific vignette, both physically and emotionally.

Johnson looks at potential subject matter through the lens of a designer, asking himself questions like, Will it be fun to design? or Can it be conceptually simplified? In considering his approach to choosing material for a new piece, Johnson remarks, “Half of it is the subject, and the other half is the love for design and the abstract bones of the art. How can you take something that has this sense of light and heat and air that you love about the Southwest, and also make it into a piece of art?”

Although Johnson’s paintings aren’t direct representations of his surroundings, they nevertheless possess what he refers to as the “arid sense of light” found exclusively in the American Southwest. This informs all of his work in one way or another, as he takes beautiful, unspoiled, rugged nature and examines it through his personal lens to see how it refracts, and how he can reassemble the fragments in an engaging, innovative manner. “It’s like you chew it up and spit it out as something different,” he explains.

Like most artists, Johnson believes he is on a journey of continual discovery, forever searching for aesthetic perfection within that fertile blank canvas. “That’s my goal,” he says, “to just keep trying to make something that I think is beautiful and is satisfying to me.”

Johnson is currently making work for a solo exhibition at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in October. He also plans to participate in the Masters of the American West show at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles next February. Until then, he’ll keep on painting, edging ever closer to that visual and emotional ideal. He sums up his creative vision decisively this way: “The important and unwavering thing I care about is the hope that I can take viewers to a place where the land is big and the light is clear.”

representation
Maxwell Alexander Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

 

This story was featured in the August 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art August 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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