Jan Louise Johnson

(she/her)

I am a painter living in Portland OR, engaged in the exploration of the relationships between humans, animals, plants and environment as reflected through myth, fable, story, pattern and ornament. 

My mother died when I was very young, but she had already purchased for me a series of booklets of masterworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It came with stamps of the paintings you could paste into the books. This was my first important influence.  My paintings have ranged from very big to very small, but painting has always felt like an intimate place that you could wriggle into if you were very lucky.

My father gave me his childhood book series Journeys Through Bookland, which introduced me to a world of fantastic stories.  Later I took my only formal schooling in art at Saturday classes at the Toledo Art Museum.  After classes I had the museum mostly to myself. I spent a lot of time with the El Greco and a beautifully ornamented stove that had a built-in seat that you could sneak onto and a collection of elaborately dressed wax “dolls” in the basement-one, I think, carried her own head.  I have always hoped to live up to these images.

I studied literature in college and later at Naropa Institute and wrote a few decent poems, but story as image is more natural for me. I heard my first opera, fell in love with Virginia Woolf, and painted a portrait of Rimbaud while in college. Don’t let anyone tell you the humanities aren’t worth it.

I moved to Denver and found an amazing art community. I had no idea how to paint but I did it anyway-big figurative expressionist paintings with most of the themes that have stayed with me-relationships, feral people, nature, tornados and cornucopia, flowers, goddesses, especially Persephone, and women, often with children. In Denver I exhibited at one of the first cooperative galleries, Pirate, and also at Cydney Payton Artfolio, Payton Rule Gallery, Rule Modern and Contemporary, Inkfish, Hassel Haesler Gallery, the Arvada Center, as well as Crescent Gallery in Belfast, Fountainhead Gallery in Houston, Monteverdi Gallery in Taos, CPC in Chicago and elsewhere. I instituted an art in public places billboard project and garnered favorable reviews.

Simultaneously, I started to work in animation.  Local artists were recruited as cel painters, back in the day when individual “cels” were painted by hand while wearing white gloves. There was a huge cross-over between the fine art community and the animation community. We worked hard, gossiped constantly and went home to paint, make prints or draw.

By 2002 I had become an Executive Producer at the animation company I worked for in Denver (Celluloid Studios) and I was recruited to be a co-EP at Portland Oregon’s Vinton Studios-later LAIKA, LAIKA/house and House Special   The creative team work of animation was inspiring, but the job was demanding.  I slowly worked through ideas and paintings. Experiments with new media were worked around 50-60 hour weeks at the animation studio.  

In 2017 I left the animation industry to return to painting. It is a great joy to walk through the doors to my studio each day.