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BIOGRAPHY
JEROME JOHNSON is a visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn NY. A lifetime thrust of Johnson's work has been a crossing over between fine art and architecture.
During the 1960's he was a part of a group of California artists surrounding Peter Voulkes, whose expansion of conventional ceramics into sculpture was influential in the U.S. By the late 60s Johnson came to prefer the medium of welded aluminum, creating large minimalist pieces manifesting the Voulkes-acquired freedom to cross between paradigms. By adding mobility to minimalism his sculpture in the 70s had become quite large with some elevated on trestles that the viewer was invited to manipulate. Others were installed on tracks with movable parts that could be pushed back and forth on the ground. A bridge piece had platforms that opened and closed.
In the late 70's and early 80s he continued to work in aluminum on a smaller scale. Painted allusions to abstract landscapes were visually held together by open frames and cubist volumes still within a relatively minimal motif.
Moving to Brooklyn in the mid 1980's, direct contact with the art world reduced the influence of pure-form minimalism on his work. Johnson was attracted instead to urban architecture of NYC with particular attention paid to the Modernist movement. Some large welded sculptures reflected this research but he abandoned that medium to reflect new interests.
To explore his new love of 20c. architecture he invented painting strategies to present the proportional attributes of buildings. He imposed abstract shapes onto actual images of iconic buildings to enhance recognition of their proportions. Practically the whole league of Modernist architects were re-imaged in this way. He used varieties of scale and paint media such as gouache or egg tempera and particularly encaustic which over time he would apply as sculptural surfaces when he returned to it. see www.jeromejohnsonart.blogspot.com
In 1999 armed with the language of architectural geometry, sculpture again came to the fore. This time in fabricated wood constructing hollow core structures and began to explore the architecture of technology. See ABOUT.