Reflecting on the last decade’s work

alexart63@yahoo.co.,uk

Lewes, East Sussex

UK

Adherence to a formulaic way of working as some painters do has never interested me. I get bored quickly and I’m not someone who can paint the same painting over and over again and remain interested.

I had imagined that by my late fifties that my ‘style’ would have settled into an easily recognisable’ look’ but in fact although I can see a clear stylistic progression through my work over the last thirty years, I haven’t yet settled into one style and I may never do so. I’m quite happy with this as most of the artists I like myself have worked in a similar way, with radical shifts of style and subject every few years; Picasso, Maggie Hambling, Prunella Clough and David Bowie to name a few.

People who know my work can see when something is mine, possibly because the drawn line always underpins the painted image in whatever I do and has its own signature just as handwriting does. Broadly speaking my work has always straddled the borders of representation and abstraction but even when making abstract images, there has always been a specific subject matter. Having been predominantly occupied with portraying people and their bodies in the twenty or so years after I left college, in 2010 I decided to try working for a decade in purely abstracted forms, not allowing myself to portray faces or bodies, or at least not in a recognisable way.

I floundered for a couple of years – not having the structure of a physical form to fall back on was a struggle – but in 2012 I hit upon the idea of using my father’s wartime aerial reconnaissance photos as the starting point for a series of silkscreen editions that would take me a year to complete. These were the first purely abstract images I made that I was happy with and I continued painting from the photos after the silkscreen editions were completed. In the end I made sixteen limited-edition silkscreens, all square in format and documented in a book ‘Reconnaissance’ which is available from my website. The work was exhibited in a solo show at 35 North Contemporary in Brighton and five of the images at The Towner Gallery in 2014.

In 2015 we moved house and I set up a purpose-built studio in a more rural East Sussex setting (similar to the environment where I had grown up in the 1960’s and 70’s). It took some time to settle into the new working space but I soon became involved in a new project; documenting a local ex-WW2 airfield, about two miles away from the new studio. This tied-in with my previous work about my Dad’s photos; he had been a Spitfire pilot and Deanland Airfield was one of the Advance Landing Grounds built to host the pilots and planes that would fight the Battle of Britain in 1944. During this time I had an exhibition in Brighton and at the private view I met a Brighton-based photographer, John Brockliss, who works exclusively with Leica cameras producing mainly black and white images which he publishes in books every couple off years. We got talking and I invited him to the studio and later out to the airfield to see the site.

It soon became apparent that we both had an interest in the Second World War and John also enjoys taking photos of people at work, he decided to make a book documenting the project called ‘Deanland’ after the airfield. This project lasted another two years from 2016 – 18 and resulted in two joint exhibitions (one at Farley’s Farmhouse Gallery, now home to the Lee Miller archives and run by her son Antony Penrose). John also produced a book combining his black and white shots of me working with colour plates of the paintings, silkscreens and etchings that make up the body of work. We were incredibly fortunate to have Antony Penrose write a foreword to the book.

It was during the last months of the Deanland Project in 2018 that I noticed figures had begun to creep back into the painted work, firstly in the form of silhouettes, then in one of the etchings a small representation of my father in his flying suit taken from a tiny photo I have of him. I pushed on with the abstracted work for a couple of years and gradually the more geometric shapes I had been using began to soften, showing the influence of more organic colours and a post-impressionistic style. In 2019 I began the next series of paintings based on a trip I made to Guernica. Similarly in a couple of these paintings there are impressions of figures – although fairly ambiguous and lacking detail – it was obvious they were making their way back into the paintings.

At the turn of 2020, I allowed myself to begin working on drawings that consciously included or focussed on figures again. As with the previous abstracted images, I chose to work from photographs taken in the aftermath of the first and second world wars. This had started when I was researching the aftermath of the bombing of Guernica by fascist forces in 1937. I had made paintings of one or two original bomb-site photos and combined them with sketches I made when I visited the town. I am interested in the resilience of people and nature and the ability we have to recover from the chaos and catastrophe of war. Visiting Guernica (totally destroyed in two days of ‘blitzkrieg’ bombing by German planes belonging to Hitler) one would never guess that it had been obliterated. If it weren’t for the museums and various plaques and memorials, there would be no clue after 80 years of what had happened there. I suppose being old enough myself to have parents who were alive at the time it was destroyed and indeed remembered the bombing of the town, I am astonished at the speed of recovery and transition from bomb-site back to community.

In essence I am doing the same as I have been doing for the past ten years; using black and white photographs and reworking them into new images, playing with scale, colour and form in order to explore what they mean to me. Currently I am collecting stereoscope cards depicting images from late-Victorian and the early twentieth century. I collect what interests me and try not to question too much why that may be. During the first lockdown, I began drawing a photograph a day on A1 paper with charcoal. It was great to be drawing people again and I picked men and women from different eras and countries; classical paintings by Chardin and Velazquez as well as more modern photographic images of Andy Warhol and David Bowie. I have tried to draw them all in a similar style to each other, their only common denominator is that I have chosen to draw them because they interest me.

Currently I’m working from a series of photos taken by a white military officer in India in the 1930’s. I am trying to select the Indian people he has photographed and provide a respectful documentation of these people who have largely been written out of ‘Raj-era’ history. It is really these marginalised and overlooked people who interest me – we’ve heard enough about the generals and East India Company already. I’m not quite sure where this current series is headed, whether there will be enough coherent paintings to for an exhibition or book remains to be seen, in the meantime I’m just following my instinct and enjoying the work.

DEANLAND AIRFIELD; why am I here?

Tracking the journey that has lead me to be working as artist in residence at Deanland Airfield, East Sussex.

Winter 1973, Fiveacres Garden Centre, near Chichester, West Sussex. 

In the sitting room of the tiny bungalow on the garden centre where I grew up, we are in the middle of another power cut on a winter’s evening in 1973, sitting by candle-light and the coal fire which we have lit because the electric three-bar fire we normally use is suddenly redundant. There’s no power for the TV either so for entertainment, Dad is showing my sister and me an old photo album of strange black and white photos that look like bits of lace or netting. The photos are in pieces and glued next to each other and he explains that they form a bigger picture of the ground from the air, next to the photos are neat lines of old-fashioned writing in white ink on the black paper, which also seems very exotic and other-worldly.

I have never seen anything like these images before; in the days before the internet and satellite imagery you rarely ever saw photos like this, they could only be taken from a plane or balloon. In the candlelight, I find the photos magical. Dad explained how he would fly over to Germany in his Spitfire and take these photos so that the allied forces could plan out where to drop bombs on the enemy, they were looking for bomb-factories and enemy aircraft on the ground. At ten years old this information rather drifted over me, but I loved the patterns of the roads, fields and coastlines.

My understanding of WW2 at the time was sketchy at best. I sometimes watched a programme called ‘The World at War’ on Sunday afternoons with Dad. It was in black and white, silent film clips of soldiers and tanks that seemed to have happened a very long time ago. In reality, the war had ended less than 30 years before and only 18 years before I was born. I realise now that the memories of it were probably still fairly fresh in Don’s mind; he would add snippets of information to the soundtrack of the TV programme between Laurence Olivier’s lugubrious commentary. No-one else I knew ever mentioned the war, even Dad didn’t ever really speak of it unless something came on the telly like this, we didn’t learn about it in school and nobody else wanted to talk about it. It was over.

Fishbourne, near Chichester, 2011

I’m over visiting Dad who is unwell. We sit at the kitchen table poring over the morning paper, our limited conversation has run out as it tends to do after half an hour or so. Recently he has written his memoir of the war years between 1940 and ‘45 which he has had printed and bound in an RAF blue cover. I have read it and been astounded by how much technical information he is still able to remember about the mechanics and statistics of the planes he flew, as well as his evocative portraits of the characters he knew and civilians he met during those years. I’ve been thinking that it would be interesting to try and make some work about his experiences in the war, but don’t really know where to begin. I’ve tried to draw his portrait on a couple of occasions, but his self-consciousness and my nervousness meant that these never amounted to anything of interest. I ask him if we could have a look at the scrapbooks he showed me as a child with the aerial photographs, he nods and ambles off to his study. A few minutes later he shuffles back in with a box-file and a couple of old fashioned photo albums, both a bit worse for wear.

He lays them on the kitchen table and as soon as we flip open the first page he seems infused with energy and enthusiasm – providing a commentary and answers to my questions about the photos as we make our way through. The stories are endless, his recollections of specific shots he took are as clear as if he had just landed after a sortie. One airfield he photographed in Portugal is particularly memorable because he felt jealous of the lucky pilots who got to use its pristine geometrical tarmac – he himself had taken off from a dusty gravel runway a few hours before in North Africa and wasn’t looking forward to a smooth landing on his return. The Portuguese runway looked like a number 4, rotated forty-five degrees to the right. This became one of the first of the sixteen abstracted silkscreens that formed the ‘Reconnaissance’ series in 2012.

August 2016, Laughton, East Sussex.

Don died peacefully in 2014. About a year later we moved to Laughton from Hove and I find myself in the village shop and post office chatting with Steve the manager. On the counter is a pile of booklets with a photo of a Spitfire on the front and the word ‘Deanland’ underneath. It catches my eye – as much for the title as the image – ‘Deanland’ I think, ‘what a great name for an exhibition’. I pick it up and flick through and am stopped short by an aerial photograph showing a runway in a cruciform shape. My first thought is that its composition is remarkably similar to a silkscreen I made a few years before called ‘Pilot’ conceived as an abstract portrait of Dad. Always on the lookout for coincidences like this, I buy the booklet and take it back to the studio.

Later that day, having read the booklet about the history of Deanland, I’m on my bike cycling over to the site of the airfield in Ripe, which turns out to be only about three miles away from my studio. I prowl the perimeter fence wary of the ‘entry prohibited’ signs, take a few shots of the windsocks and some distant light-aircraft. I instinctively realise this is a gift to me as an artist and that it will be the beginning of a new series of paintings. Feeling energised I head back to the studio to find out who runs the airfield now and if I might be allowed on site to make some work about the place. Shortly afterwards my friend Jean tells me that she knows David who runs the site now and forwards me his email address, I arrange to meet him for a tour.

Laughton, East Sussex, June 2017

And so we come full circle, it’s five years later in 2017. With the discovery of the airfield, suddenly it feels right to follow-up on the work I made about Dad’s reconnaissance photographs and to continue the story. I met with owner David Brook and later Gerry Price at Deanland and have been accepted as a proxy ‘artist in residence’ to continue the story of the legacy of the airfield by relating what exists there now to the time that has passed.

‘Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past ‘– so wrote T.S. Eliot in the Four Quartets. Indeed the sounds and smells of the airfield have changed very little over the years since the war in some respects although in other ways of course, it’s another world. I felt my job as an artist was to identify aspects of the airfield that have remained the same in the intervening seventy years; windsocks, wheel chocks, petrol canisters, oil stains on the hangar floors, corrugated iron and rust and to ensure these details were represented in some way, being in their own way just as much icons of twentieth century aviation as the Spitfires and Hurricanes that they attended.

The concrete of the original runway was mostly broken up after the war and the runway (only a fraction of the original cruciform shape) is now grass, but I have used the texture of concrete in the paintings, built up by stippling the paint, just as one stipples the surface of poured concrete with a plank, in order to give it some tread in icy weather. Hopefully, by combining the details I have chosen to represent with elements from Don’s photos and the landscape surrounding the airfield, I can get an abstracted impression of the place, perhaps something that the pilots who were based here in the war, as well as those who use the runways now, might recognise. Growing up in the shadow of the South Downs, I feel their swooping lines are in my blood already, Downland shapes appear quite naturally throughout my work, including that of Deanland, which is just how it should be.

Alexander Johnson, June 2017

 

DEANLAND project

March 22, 2017

Working at Deanland Airfield in East Sussex, just down the road from my studio, I’m slowly building up a series of drawings on paper and oils on canvas. This work is a continuation of my interest in the legacy of WW2. I go out to the airfield periodically to sketch and soak up the atmosphere, like all airfields it has a beautiful feeling of space, added to this Deanland for me holds the history of what went on there towards the end of the war; Spitfires taking off to support the D-Day landings. My father Don Johnson flew Spitfires as a young man, I’m not sure if he ever flew from here but many like him did and some never returned. My intention is to evoke the invisible history of the place, combined with what exists today.

It struck me that, although originally built in 1944, there is little there now that provides testament to this fact. The original runway was a cruciform shape and fairly large, much what remains of the original runway is now broken up, some lying under the Deanland estate which provides housing for older people in static homes, some is now woodland. The current runway uses only a fraction of the lower half of the cruciform original and none of the original concrete is now visible, the runway is now grass, the original buildings replaced by new ones. There is a raised arc of turf which curves around the edge of the plot to the original fuelling point and concrete standing, nestling behind bushes and a couple of large oaks.

My problem was to find a way of using what is there now as a way of reflecting on what went on there in the past. It occurred to me that the trees in any rural landscape are often the only witnesses to what went on in the past. I like this idea. Human behaviour changes – I see girls on horses riding past the house, busy on their mobile phones while the horse beneath them trots along oblivious – but the jackdaws arguing amongst themselves in the trees were ever thus, their language and behaviour unchanging and changeless.

Most of the plants and trees surrounding the airfield now are low-level; managed woodland and brushwood, hawthorn and weeds. The exception are two large oaks, both overlooking the airfield to the side of the original runway. Each time I visited to sketch at the airfield I thought ‘if those trees could talk’….So I decided to use the oaks as a basis for some paintings, effectively giving them a voice. Measuring the circumference of the largest one, the online Woodland Trust calculator estimates it at 230 years old or thereabouts. It would already have been a mature tree during the time of the original airfield’s construction seventy-five years ago and would have witnessed pilots and Spitfires, laughter and anxiety. Perhaps pilots like my father leant against it smoking a Players cigarette while their plane was refuelled. So I imagined a time-lapse stretching back and rather than paint a landscape decided to go for a bit of magic-realism, placing what I imagine the tree must have witnessed within the structure of the branches. Suddenly the work itself began to take off and I felt I was beginning to capture some of the magic I feel at Deanland.

More recently I have placed myself inside one of the hangars looking out and made sketches that are framed by the doorway of the hangar. This creates a geometric structure to the painting and more importantly to me, a perspective that would have been the same seventy years ago, the shape of aircraft hangars has remained pretty much unchanged, though now they are made of PVC stretched over a metal frame rather than corrugated iron. To this structure I add visual clues to the past, pilots standing around waiting to scramble, aircraft taking off. I am trying to capture the spirit of the scene rather than a photographic-type record; a feeling of space, of excitement and trepidation. The pilots who fly from the airfield now are often milling around and I talk with them, explain what I am doing and hear their own experiences of flying small aircraft over to France and beyond.

The colours I’m using are muted to suggest a sepia-toned record, like the black and white photos I have of my father and his squadron. I am not copying directly from the old photos, having looked at them so often over my life, they are all entrenched in my memory, so I allow myself free hand to paint what comes to my mind during the painting process.

Documenting this work is photographer Joh Brockliss, who himself works mainly in black and white using only Leica cameras. He is producing a hardback book that will accompany the exhibition; shots of the airfield, the work process there and my studio practice turning the on-site sketches into paintings. I expect to be busy with this project at least until the end of 2017, excited to see where it will take me. As thew work is finished I post it on my website under ‘DEANLAND’ in the main menu. I also have a Facebook art page at FB.com/alexanderjohnsonart and twitter feed @alexart63. Always keen to hear comments on the work.

Alexander Johnson, March 22, 2017

Graphic Influence.

It was the Dadaists who first began to use ready-printed graphic images in their work and present it as ‘fine art’ – you can see it in the masterful collages of Hannah Hóch and the work of Schwitters, Tzara and John Heartfield. These were artists who began working during the first world war and thought the most effective way they could make a pacifist statement was to point out that everything so far, including the art so beloved of the generals and middle classes, had culminated in the bloodiest most brutal war in memory and should therefore be rejected. The way they rejected the established order was to literally cut it up and collage it back together to make a new world with art. Inventing collage as we know it today may be the single most influential act they conceived, in that it also went on to become part of the working method of writers such as Joyce, Woolf and Burroughs and musicians including, Neu! and David Bowie in the 1970’s as well as visual artists. People laughed and vilified the Dadaists at the time, but in light of their subsequent influence over our digital world, not to mention Dadaism sowing the seeds of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual and Performance Art and latterly Punk, we can see that in fact they had more or less predicted to the future of the 20^th century.

In the late 1950’s, a group of artists in New York including Rauschenberg and Warhol began to settle on the ideas begun by the Dadaists and present it as central to their Fine Art practice. Their work had enormous influence over the popular graphic design of the time, from American magazines like Time and Life, to book covers and record covers – it was clear to see. I first became enchanted by graphic design through my teenage obsession with Punk. The first LP covers I remember really making me feel that something new was happening, were the Clash’s first LP designed by Caroline Coon, Jamie Reid’s unashamed Dadaist work plagiarised for the Sex Pistols and the masterful work of Linder on covers by the Buzzcocks and Magazine which continued where Hannah Hoch had left off, using images from womens’ magazines and subverting them through collage. I had an instinctive connection with work, it appealed to my sense of humour and irreverence for rules and the established order – I had contempt for people who just didn’t get it. Punk left me feeling wonderfully marginalised from mainstream tastes (something which has never really left me) and knowing that the only real option for me was Art College, where I went in 1980 at the age of 16. As a coda, when the headmaster of my comprehensive school discovered that I had applied for a two-year Foundation Course at Worthing Art Collage, I was summoned to his smoky office. He said that if it was my choice to ‘throw my life away and end up on drugs’ that Art College was a good place to start and dismissed me. I was ecstatic.

At Art College the tutors had me marked out for a career in graphic design, but after two years of trying unsuccessfully to tell me what to do and how to do it, admitted that a Fine Art degree might be a better option. I myself acknowledged that whilst I had no interest in making it, my love of and respect for graphic design would always be with me and I wasn’t about to hide it; why should I? If it was good enough for Warhol and Rauschenberg, it was good enough for me. It set me at loggerheads with most of the painting tutors on my Fine Art degree course at Cardiff Art College, hippy guys who had been at the Slade in the early 1970’s making huge abstract paintings, who all told me I was clinging on to my bright colours and defined shapes like a toddler to a teddy bear. I refused to succumb to their browns and greys and stuck doggedly to my day-glo tones, ending up in the print room making ever more lurid silkscreens – which elicited the desired contempt from the tutors I hated. I ended up with a second-class degree as a direct result of not doing what I was told, all the students who had towed the muddy-abstract line got firsts. Few of them however are artists today. If you survive by doing what you are told, who are you when those people are gone?

When I began making abstract work I wondered if the influence of graphic imagery would still be discernible, but if anything my acknowledgement of the masterful composition of graphic heroes such as Peter Saville is more intact than ever. When you are resolving composition in abstract you become even more aware of the fine balance between line, shape and colour, precisely because there isn’t the distraction of trying to make an image that ‘looks like’ something. The older I get the more I want to simplify; when I was young I tried to squeeze as many ideas into each image as possible, now I want to leave only essential marks on the canvas. Work should become more thoughtful as we age – to reflect our own depth of experience and understanding – equally at this time in history when we are bombarded from every screen and surface with figurative images and faces, it feels right to be making work that offers an antidote to this human-centric world. Like the Dadaists I like to feel that by rejecting recognisable imagery in my work, I’m also rejecting all that I dislike about popular culture; the obsession with how people look and what they wear, the formulaic popular television and crass advertising campaigns and logos that swamp our cities. I may be kidding myself, but it feels like the right thing to do.