CELIA JOHNSON
I know I am always looking to mine a challenging visual journey, to stay out of a comfort zone, to go out and walk the plank, take things up a level. Charline Von Heyl calls it crafting an “idiosyncratic authentic voice.” It’s a search and discovery, ideally a high-wire act, which demands risk, which in turn confronts fear. It’s hard to do.
-Celia Johnson
Celia Johnson, Comhrá, acrylic on birch panel, 2020, 24 x 21 in
Comhrá, the title of the newest work by Celia Johnson on view in NC Women Abstract Painters, is a Gaelic term meaning dialogue, discourse or gossip. Comhrá’s graceful open composition, refined surfaces and curvilinear shapes suggesting numerals, fonts or puzzle pieces immediately solicit the viewer’s eye. Yet once one enters into this conversation it becomes apparent that the visual syntax of this painting is articulated with the precision of a chess master’s endgame.
Layered, flat color fields appear to float above or recede beneath the unpainted birch panel of the picture plane, following a playful yet precise choreography. Disruptions, such as a shard of red at the intersection of central white and yellow zones reshuffle our understanding of figure/ground relationships and open up new sequences. Johnson’s paint handling, honed through years of her encaustic practice, invites the viewer into a longer exchange on the relationship between repetition and difference, absence and presence.
When compared with an earlier painting Fithis (2016) with which it shares design elements, Comhrá appears less contained, reaching beyond the panel’s rectangular boundaries. Seemingly spontaneous effects of color seeping up to the surface, or veering close to edges add a new inflection to Johnson’s explorations of layered illusionistic space. Modest yet daring, Comhrá is a joyous ode to invention.
Our friends at Greensboro Downtown Yoga created the following Indiefit sequence inspired by Celia Johnson’s painting, Comhrá |