Preparing for some 200 or so art lovers to traipse through your home in the space of six hours might give the most accomplished host pause, but one beachside artist is ready – nay, eager – to welcome the crowds Saturday, when the Vero Beach Art Club hosts the annual Art Trail of 10 artists’ studios.
This is watercolorist Joel Johnson’s third time on the tour.
This year, in addition to his realistic watercolor paintings, the artist looks forward to showing off his newly enlarged workspace.
“Now it is really a studio,” he beams as he glances about the bright and spacious room. His old atelier, he says, was only half its size.
Sharing your personal space with the public for the day is what the Art Trail is all about, according to Johnson.
“Let them see what you surround yourself with, to create.”
Visiting an artist’s studio reveals many personal details about the life of its tenant. In one corner of Johnson’s studio is a shrine to the military service of the artist’s father and uncle: Two small photos of saluting men in uniform flank a vintage lithograph of a waving American flag. Propped in a window is a Wyoming license plate from the car his father used to drive; near that is a wood candleholder that was carved by Johnson’s Swedish grand-uncle.
On either side of a watercolor portrait by Johnson of his aged mother are arranged small framed works by artist friends; nearby a plinth holds a terracotta portrait head that Johnson posed for, created by a noted Western artist, George Carlson.
And, of course, paintings by Johnson occupy every wall in the house.
On an easel in the studio stands a work in progress, the rusted visage of a 1970s-era pickup truck; elsewhere hang a sun-washed street in Italy, and the rippled reflection of a church spire in old window glass. There is a Bahamian beach scene, a frozen road in rural Pennsylvania, and some purple mountains’ majesty in the American West. There are figure pieces, too: A young violinist tunes her instrument in the living room, while a pair of little ballerinas poses in the dining room.
Johnson has a personal connection to all the subjects of his pictures; the people in them are relatives, friends, and the children of friends; his landscape and architectural pieces are of places he has lived, or visited and loved.
For this artist, the faithful depiction of reality is not the only aspect of his art, nor is it for him the most meaningful. His realistic style, Johnson stresses, contains abstract passages that lend visual tension and depth to his pictures.
“The window up there was in Beaufort, South Carolina,” he says of the painting of the church reflection. “Some of the panes in the window were older glass, some were newer glass. It took that reflection and disrupted it.”
Turning to the painting of the truck, he speaks of “the academic element of texture: rust and corrosion and reflections.”
“For me, it’s not a truck, it’s a vehicle – literally – for expression in watercolor of the elements of texture and transparency.”
Johnson’s most enduringly popular theme is Venice, which he last visited about three years ago with his wife, Denise Peschio. The city appeals to him as much for its architecture as for the light that plays upon its watery “streets.”
Johnson notes that he has sold more pictures of Venice than any other subject. He is far from tired of painting it, and contemplates a future trip to collect subject matter for his next Venetian series.
It isn’t entirely the salability of Venice that excites him, however. “It’s the abstract part, which I really love. The abstracting of reality that you see in whatever’s being reflected.”
Another specialty of Johnson’s art is his native Wyoming. Art Trail visitors will not see any major paintings of that subject; the ones still left in the artist’s possession are currently on display in his retrospective exhibition at Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyoming. That show runs through the middle of January.
Johnson grew up in the little oil refining town of Sinclair. His father was a welder with the Sinclair oil refinery; his mother was an elementary school teacher. Johnson’s paternal grandfather, a woodcarver, was from Sweden; the family name was Jonsson until a clerk at Ellis Island anglicized it.
Young Joel loved to draw; the Alamo and the Matterhorn were two of his favorite subjects. He admits to being “obsessed” by the latter, drawing it over and over from memory, after seeing the Disney movie, “Third Man on the Mountain,” in 1959.
When Johnson finished 6th grade, his parents moved with him and his sister to Rollins, Wyoming, where the boy met the first of his mentors, art teacher Bill Williams, in junior high school.
“He was a great analyzer of your work. He could see things you couldn’t see, and he could help you to make those improvements. He had a great eye for that,” says Johnson, who went on to earn a BA in secondary art education from Westminster College in Salt Lake City. After several years of teaching high school art and coaching (he played basketball in college) Johnson returned to school, this time to Utah State University in Logan, for an MFA.
“I just wanted to be at a higher level for my work,” Johnson says. With the MFA he was able to get teaching jobs in colleges in Idaho and Colorado, and at Spokane Art School in Washington. Today, he teaches classes in watercolor at the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
After spending most of his life west of the Mississippi, Johnson moved to Vero ten years ago with his wife, who grew up in Deerfield Beach. He is reluctant to make comparisons between the paintabilty of Florida and the western landscape, but he has one caveat for the artist who contemplates relocating to a new environment.
“I’ve found that no matter where you reside, it takes almost 10 years to really observe what is there that appeals to you, and will become part of what it is you want to express.”
That said, Johnson is now beginning a series of Florida cloudscapes, starting with a large commission from a local resident.
Saturday’s Art Trail runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets can be purchased in advance from the art club and at artist’s studios on the day on the event.
