David Johnson
David Johnson
David Johnson was born across the big river in Fort Dodge, Iowa. He attended public school, walked beans, baled hay, and worked as a busboy and janitor. He graduated with a BFA in Drawing from the University of Iowa where he discovered prints with Virginia Myers. He held jobs as a state liquor store clerk, built grain elevators on the Mississippi River worked in the K-Mart Pet and Garden Center, picked apples in Washington State and fell off the Christmas tree truck. He put together the Ferris Wheel for the carnival and stacked boxes in the Sears catalog warehouse in Minneapolis. He studied Printmaking again with Fred Hagstrom at the Cleveland Institute of Art and graduated with an MFA from Miami University where he worked with Robert Wolfe.
David taught at Miami University, Anderson College and for 33 years at Ball State University where he taught Foundations, Beginning Drawing, Figure Drawing, Introduction to Printmaking and Relief Printmaking. He has shown his Intaglio, Relief Prints and Books in approximately 400 exhibitions since 1983. His work is in the collections of the New York Public Library, the Boston Public Library, Yale, Oberlin College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Indiana University among others.
I am drawn to Relief Printmaking partly due to the woodcut examples of Erich Heckel, E L Kirchner, Shiko Munakata, and Sid Chafetz among others I appreciate the low tech aspects of relief prints… I like that I can make them in my basement or on a kitchen table with a gouge a roller and a palette. My prints derive from life; the town I live in and the people I see. I love drawing… I think of it as a wonderful basic human activity, like singing. I am interested in the drawn interpretation of the world when one confronts it directly with paper and a pencil. Everyone sees and therefore draws differently, just as everyone speaks with a differing tone of voice. I love the surprise of unforeseen results when the roller covers the cut block with black ink. I appreciate the heightened impact Relief Prints impart to the original drawing… what may have been indefinite graphite scribbles turns into definite black lines and shapes. The people represented in my prints sometimes imply some sort of relationship to one another and possibly to their environment; vulnerability, maybe comradery, possibly bullying, perhaps conspiracy, fascination, envy, suspicion, shared humor, or even annoyance.
I am interested in an art that derives from ones life. I am interested in how we respond with a pencil to things in our world. In other words I am interested in drawing from life. I also love how the linoleum cut translates the drawing into the unimaginable shapes that it does. I print them in my basement with a spoon, low tech!
