There
is a remarkable closeness between the way Johnson lives and the subjects he
chooses for his paintings. The two have
influenced and inspired one another until his life and art have been fused into
a tight unity. To maintain this almost
symbiotic relationship, he finds he must carefully protect his private
world. He is initially wary of all
strangers, so ARTlines’ first
interview with him, by contributing editor Lisa Sherman, was conducted in a
Santa Fe parking lot. We were later
invited to his home, which we found to be both eccentric and breath-taking.
The
reason we’re talking here in town, in my truck, is because everything that has
been written about me has originated with interviews done up at my home and the
writers always came away with stereotypes about my being a cave man, a hermit,
the anti-social, primitive recluse. I’m
all those things, but I’m other things as well.
You have chosen to live an isolated
life. What would you like your image to
be?
I
have become much more worldly than I was.
But have to be isolated so that I can concentrate for long periods of
time without interruption. My work is
very intricate, and I’m a perfectionist about it. And, similarly, I can’t live in a place where
people have built strange things that are inharmonious with nature. I can take the life of the city for a little
while, but it bores me because it lacks perfection and a lot of it is artless. I want to live in a place that is pure and untouched
by people.
Don’t you think that’s a little
idealistic?
No,
I’ve done it. I bought the place and
built a house in a manner that I thought was harmonious. My house comes from Chaco Canyon, which I
think is the center of the world. Going
to Chaco Canyon for the first time was, I think, the most important influence
on my whole life. Before that I was a
VISTA volunteer—to get out of the draft—and I lived and worked with the Navajos
at Canyon de Chelly. That was 1965. I lived on the rim and commuted with the people down to the canyon to plant and take care
of the horses. At that time, horses and
wagons were used almost exclusively.
Now, it’s pickup trucks. I loved
the cliff dwellings there, the Mummy Cave ruin in particular. When I saw those dwellings, I decided I had
to have that—it was my dream.
Do you feel some special bond with the
Anasazi, the people who built those cliff dwellings?
Yes,
I think it’s very important in my life.
I like the way they lived within nature.
I think the Southwestern landscape is fantastic beyond all other
landscapes, and the Anasazi took it an extended it around their bodies. They built their homes on the landscape
without destroying it or changing it.
Their architecture was actually an extension of the landscape.
You
asked me if I wasn’t a little idealistic.
I’ve always idealized the primitive, but what I’ve been able to do is
refine the primitive. I’ve meticulously
taken all the best parts of the primitives I’ve known, like the Navajos, the
Zapotecs, the natives in this area, and combined them.
But you do have a real romance with the
past.
Yes. It all stems from living with the Navajo, and
it comes out in my work, which often depicts the Navajos daily routine, into
which they have incorporated into their religious life. I don’t like to separate religion from
life—it should be every moment of your existence. I go down to Oaxaca every year and live for
several months in a small village, Huayapan, with the Zapotecs. These Indians practice much of the same
lifestyle as the Anasazi did. The houses
and daily life are very similar, except that this is Mexico. I have an attraction to their culture that I
can’t explain, and I don’t even want to question it. It’s just very comfortable. They don’t understand me at all, how I can
make a living by painting, how I can live by myself and take care of
myself. In the village, the women do
everything. They pamper the man. When I’m there, I have to try and accept
that.
Do you paint different subjects while
you’re living in Mexico?
Up
here I paint Chaco Canyon, down there I paint Monte Alban. They’re very similar. When I first went to Teotihuacan, I had the
strangest feeling. When I first walked
onto that main avenue there, I felt, “This is Chaco Canyon!” And it’s a whole
different culture. I don’t understand
it. It’s just a feeling I have. When I go to Chaco Canyon now, I think
Teotihuacan.
You don’t question why you paint what
you paint?
It
shouldn’t have to be questioned. I
should paint what flows out of me naturally, without questioning it. Though painting the subjects that I choose to
paint, I find it’s a deeper way of sharing the experience and the culture. What painting has taught me is to see very,
very clearly. It’s done amazing things
to my visual perception. After I’ve painted all day, and I stop, and put my
paints away and go outside, my vision is almost hallucinogenic. Everything takes on a depth and richness that
I’ve only experienced on drugs. When I
paint, I do it very intensely, starting early in the morning. I don’t even take a break.
Has your painting always been concerned
with primitive subjects?
When
I started painting, I was in high school, and I painted weird things, probably
because I wanted a lot of attention, and painting weird things got me
that. When I look at them now, I still
find them weird, but technically they’re good.
I’ve always been amazed at my ability to work with color without any knowledge
of it. I never studied art.
 |
| Dawn Kachina, gouache, 6.25 x 9 inches |
How were the paintings weird? What did they look like?
I
painted boxes with eyeballs. We lived in
San Francisco, so I painted Victorian houses that were melting like wax. I did one of houses (sic) clipped to a close
line. And a lot of trains, which I
painted until moving to Canyon de Chelly.
Trains. . . When I was a kid, I had electric trains and I was so into
them that I ran them on time tables. I
would make tables, and type them up, and put all the trains on schedules. I even did the cover for the tables as a
painting. It was a big Santa Fe Railroad
symbol, a rising sun coming up over the mountains. It was a Southwest desert scene, and I’d
never been to the Southwest. It was
unconscious, and, in a way, foretelling the future. I would come to Santa Fe later. I still use the Indian cross in almost all of
my work.
What was it that finally brought you to
this area?
My
love for trains. It stayed with me. For a year I hopped freight trains and rode
them all over the Southwest. On my first
trip, I hopped the Santa Fe and it went through the canyon by Mount Taylor at
sunset with the sun lighting up all the red rocks like fire. It was an incredible vision that I never
forgot. It felt so familiar, as if I had
always been there. Later I came back to
the Santa Fe area and never left.
You recently did the poster for the
Santa Fe Opera. How was it different to
paint something for a particular purpose, or painting a subject to approval?
They
first ask me to do the Opera Festival poster last year, and, they said, paint
it for this, and I said, no, that I wanted to do it another way, in a certain
size, and so forth. They gave it to
Fritz Scholder instead. They wanted me
to illustrate a theme—like the opera house, or the stage, or the landscape
around the opera house. I just couldn’t
do it. I pointed out that the beautiful
posters for the Chamber Music Festival had nothing to do with the chamber
music. I hoped they had confidence in me
so that anything I did was good enough for their opera poster. And now they’ve done that. I chose something that was regional, La Conquistadora, the symbol of Santa
Fe. She’s the saint that the army
brought with them on their conquest of the Southwest. I painted her and the altar that’s built
around her in the cathedral. It’s very
Douglas Johnson, because my subject matter is usually either landscape or
Indians.
Has the success you’ve been experiencing had
much effect on your work?
Artists
have been able to transcend the public and what the public does to them—the
competition, the rivalries, the attention, the loss of privacy, all these
things that go with fame. It’s a very
difficult barrier to pass. One reason
that I moved up to the mountains to live in my cliff dwelling is because, up
there, I’m the judge of my own work. And
what happens down here, in the art world, is far away and doesn’t matter to
me. I’m my own worst critic. I’m tougher on myself than anyone else. I couldn’t sleep last night because I was
insecure about the outcome of the opera poster.
Everybody loved it today, and people thought it was incredible. It makes me very happy to have people accept
my work so enthusiastically. I’m still
not completely satisfied with it and I’ll try to do better next time. I don’t trust anyone else’s judgment, but I’m
glad they liked it.
So you do care about what people think
about your paintings?
Oh
yes, enormously. I’m more sensitive to
that than to anything else in the world.
I got a bad review once and it blew me away. I was depressed for weeks. I don’t read them anymore, because I take
them too personally. When I paint, I
paint for me, because I’m using the painting to open up parts of me. And I’m very pleased if they are accepted by
other people, if they open people’s eyes.
I like it when people say, that’s a Douglas Johnson cliff, or mountain,
or cloud, because I’ve altered their way of perceiving that cloud. I think an artist is successful when he’s
done that. People come to see the world
in your style.
I get the impression that there are more
people in your paintings than there were a few years ago.
Before,
they were empty of people. The last two
years, the work has all become populated.
Concurrently, I’ve been more involved with people. When I first moved up to the mountains eight
years ago, I really was a hermit and I hardly had any contact with people. I submitted myself to that so I could really
devote all my energy into painting, so I could become a master. I’ve come down and immersed myself in
humanity again. I got over that idea
that you had to be an acetic monk to achieve anything. Painting is easier now. I feel I’ve learned my style. It’s like learning a new language, becoming
fluent. There’s a lot more to learn
always—new words, idioms, improving your accent, but it gets easier and
easier. Now I can go to the Indian
dances, and to Mexico, which is very crowded.
I’m experiencing more human contact and, as a result, my paintings have
become populated.
But you’re not about to move into Santa
Fe, are you?
No. I’m very much into order. My house is very ordered and people upset
that order. I prefer to be alone to
maintain the order. If you look at my
work, you’ll see that it’s ordered and precise.
It’s all right to confront people in their environment, but not in
mine. So I get to Santa Fe every two
weeks or so, Espan͂ola more often.
What is it you like about Espan͂ola?
Everything. I love it.
I know a lot of people. I can
speak Spanish with them. It’s a big,
warm family, and the lowriders . . .
I think it’s a high art from. They’re so
well crafted. The people treat them as
fetishes—they’re so clean and polished.
Inside, they’re all fuzzy and they have those saints on the dash. I ride around with them and speak their
language, which is very gross but it’s special.
It’s called Spanglish, and
it’s pure slang.
Back to the primitive sources of your
paintings. Do you think primitive people
had, or have, access to some basic truth that we don’t have?
The
more experience I have, the more I think I know, the more I find that the world
gets less clear. Primitive or tribal
people knew a lot of truth that technology has numbed, and I hope, through my
art, I’m realizing some of this truth.
Art is a very mystical thing. I
may be painting something that I don’t even know consciously. Maybe, in my lifetime, I’ll realize it and my
paintings will show it to me.
Lisa
Sherman, Stephen Parks, July 1981
No comments:
Post a Comment