Significant changes triggered by Covid lockdowns, in Michael Johnson’s life and relationships, drew him from his urban focus to the south-west Scotland of childhood holidays. Vividly recollecting the freedom and significance of connection to the natural world he experienced in the coastal pastures of The Machars as a child, felt urgent enough to revisit as an adult and as an artist. And Michael Johnson has been outside drawing in the Galloway coastal landscape almost every day since the Autumn. 

A response to the un-still landscape, each day in each location, each intensely observed A4 drawing captures what he witnesses passing: shifting sand, people out walking, weather, tide, seasons, light and shadows, his own emotions. Michael Johnson goes beyond the plein air artist’s arm’s-length observations, capturing more than specifics of time and place.

Michael Johnson’s view is multi-perspectival, open and raw, hinting at a wonderfully mixed heritage: R.B. Kitaj, David Hockney, Stanley Spencer, Arthur Boyd and Hieronymus Bosch. As the individual drawings accumulate, held down by the nearest handful of sand, branch or rock, they are laid out on the land like a mosaic puzzle. These site-specific drawings become a map of unfolding experience, resonating both uniquely and universally. Collectively, a bigger, elemental picture emerges, with a spiritual dimension. In the spaces between reality, the outlines of pre-historic forms arise. The Pagan’s Green Man, Mother Earth, Adam & Eve; each seemingly negotiate their relationships with ‘The Garden of Eden’. 

“Walking and drawing for me involves sketching from life, from memory and also improvising as I go. Cumulatively these sequences reflect a particular mood or rhythm. Sometimes images may just emerge, unrelated apparently to what I may be looking at.  If I am fortunate, they can be a good surprise and their energy transfer to the making of the next and so on. Always reality intervenes: a passing person, a bird flying past, the light on the sea. In my mind may be a loose theme or background mood but usually there is no strain towards illustrating it. On the contrary, the process delights in dancing away from anything too prescribed.”

Michael Johnson considers deep connections to the memory of place: present, past and future. He gathers the landscape as a sequence of uniquely experienced moments, simultaneously a personal journey and a timeless human expression of our relationships with all living things, the universal whole.