Anna Elise Johnson
Anna Elise Johnson, Death Valley VIII, 2018
Oil on canvas 40” x 32” $5,500 Courtesy the artist Available from Space Gallery, Denver, CO 
Anna Elise Johnson, Abiquiu, 2018
Oil on canvas 44” x 38” Courtesy the artist |
Born in Germany and raised in the US, Anna Elise Johnson is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work includes paintings, video installations, and acrylic and resin sculptures filled with collage.
Johnson’s recent series of paintings merges her own contemporary landscape and seascape photographs with shapes, colours and compositions from paintings she admires. This layering inspires beautiful colours and connects the paintings with other times in art history - invoking memories of images that may have been seen before while creating altogether new artworks. Death Valley VIII is based on a photograph Johnson took of a mountainous range in the national park. In this appealing work, her blended brushwork illustrates the rolling, eroding earth, which she then complicates with overlapping colour shapes. The soft edges, blues and oranges of Abiquiu reference the New Mexico landscapes painted by Georgia O’Keefe, which is also the location of Johnson’s original photograph. In Johnson’s attractive work, however, there is abstraction and illusion. At the base of the painting, the foreground recedes into the hills but the clarity of the shapes and colours of the cliff face dance back and forth between sitting within the landscape and popping towards the surface of the canvas. An alluring effect in an attractive work. For more information crisworley.com Hedge, issue 55, pp80-86, September 2019 |