| Lester Johnson | ||
| Birth Date: January 27, 1919 |
||
| Death Date: May 30, 2010 Artist Gallery |
||
| Lester Johnson has established himself as a leading figurative painter during the Abstract Expressionist movement. A quiet man, Johnson prefers to let his work speak for him. The youngest of seven children from Minnesota, Johnson arrived in New York in 1947 and became one of the first downtown loft dwellers. Most of the time, he was penniless and supported his painting with a variety of part-time jobs including teaching art. While attending art classes, he met Larry Rivers with whom he would share a loft. Three years later, he shared studio space with Philip Pearlstein.
Fellow abstract painters often gave Johnson a hard time about his figurative work, but he followed his own drummer and produced a body of work that quivered between expressive, illusive figures and non-objective art…In the next decades of his tenacious struggle produced both a statement on the condition of man and homage to the act of painting. Johnson paints the urban crowd; men and women interacting in the collective bustle of the city. Johnson said; “there is no balance in my paintings because balance seems to me to be static. Life, which I try to reflect in my paintings, is dynamic…To me; my paintings are action paintings – paintings that move across the canvas, paintings that do not get stuck, but flow like time”.
|
||