Cave Painting, Lascaux, France (ca. 17,000 BCE)

A brief history of marks...

The making of marks goes back a long time. It transcends literature, as what is literature, but a relatively recent invention; a highly refined and codified set of marks which paint pictures in the mind.

Long ago, in the "before time," Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and one of its earliest uses was to illuminate deep cave walls in Lascaux, France, so that marks could be assembled into totemic hunting images for ritualistic purposes. Since then, marks have been domesticated and herded into the service of villages, priests, city states, kings and popes...

In the Modernist epoch, an industrial economy, along with other factors, such as photographic reproduction technology, liberated these marks from their servitude to the structures of social control, and put them back in the hands of the individual artist-shaman; starting with the Impressionists and hitting a high water-mark of individual-expression with the Abstract Expressionists in the mid-20th Century.

Zhang Xu, China (ca. 8th Century)

But this is not new, the Taoist calligraphers of the Tang dynasty were so expressive with their marks, that the poetry they were transcribing became almost impossible to read, and the marks themselves became the true expression of the poem, and the ACT of transcribing that poem became part of the subject matter (very similar to the much later Abstract Expressionists of the west). So this personal expressionism is not new. I would even argue that it goes all the way back to those early shamanistic images on cave walls, as those were most probably created by tribal medicine men who imbued their work with a great deal of personal fervor.

About my work...

My work shares much with the Abstract Expressionists of the mid-20th Century, except for an important fact: I am not of their generation; I share not their experiences, nor their position in the late stages of an industrial economy. I am rather, positioned in the early stages of a tertiary, information-based, economy which is setting the stages for what may very well be the end-game of humanity as we know it (I'm speaking of an evolutionary shift towards post-humanity here, not of biblical Armageddon).

Willem de Kooning, New York (ca. 1950)

Technology has let the population genie out of the bottle, and we are quickly becoming out of balance with our planet and fellow species. It seems all too obvious that survival and the "pursuit of happiness" under these conditions will require vast changes in political and economic structure, and the status of the individual. Nano-technology and genetics will eventually alter our bodies and our environment; we will become truly protean beings who will either learn to live together or obliterate ourselves. In a sense, the "hive collective" will become the necessary architecture of survival, but I don't have to like it... ;)

But, I digress...

Under the artist as indicator-species theory -- that artists are like tree-frogs and that our demise and shrill death cries are a sign of something important, and that these cries being heard may help inform change in some kind of positive fashion in the great dialectic of progress -- it then becomes imperative for us to cry our barbaric yawp in our own unique voice. To me then, it seems only natural to return to a mode and methodology which celebrates the pure, authentic, and liberated individual, as this sort of individualism is undoubtedly a fad whose time is rapidly coming to a close.

So, about my barbaric yawp...

I am a firm believer in all that Harold Rosenberg dogma about the "artist as hero," and art as an heroic act, and of artwork as the record of that event-act. I start out with the terror of the blank canvas, and I make a mark, and then another mark, and then another. I paint out marks; I make new ones; I scrape them off; I assault the canvas and attempt to engage it in some sort of battle, or copulation, or at its height, a personal-shamanistic trance -- a dance.

Birth of Venus (detail), Philip Johnson, Astoria, OR (2006)

At its core, the act, or the event, must have rhythm and energy. Not all paintings succeed, however. Such is life. The end result, the "waste product" of this act, or event, is the painting, which I hope will find an audience who will somehow be enriched by a relationship with the object. This is one of the reasons that part of my working aesthetic is to inject these works with a high degree of rorschach-test value. I want the audience to be able to meet the resulting object half-way and actively engage in their decoding. What I have to say, I say in the act, and methodology, of their creation. I have no specific narratives to reveal except maybe, here, in writing.

These are not works about formal aesthetics, although those aesthetics do play a role. These are work about individual expression; about personal struggle and endeavor; about the savagery and joy of life, and most of all about the Tao, the way, and following one's bliss, which does not necessarily bring one bliss...

In closing...

But much of this is simply over-caffeinated, embarrassingly grandiose, conjecture on a cloudy Astoria morning and will undoubtedly be subject to change and future revision...

--Philip Johnson
Astoria, Oregon, April 25th, 2006.

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