The Paintings of Meredith Johnson

An artist apart, Meredith Johnson ignored the art market to concentrate on a personal vision. Her work is admired and collected by other artists but rarely offered for sale. Among her paintings the viewer always finds one that resonates in the subconscious; a “must have.”

This isn’t only about scale or colour, but something deeper and more magical; the paintings collect and capture light. Their Mediterranean radiance attracts and delights the eye, but it is their intriguing complexity that stirs the imagination. Knowledgeable viewers discover subtle references to Pompeiian paintings, Renaissance art and even to Japanese prints.

She painted in series, exploring through theme and variation, the shifting balance of painterly expression and compositional order. Her distinct brushwork imparts an undertone of sensuality to even the most austere image. 

Johnson said, “My paintings are like gardens, a balance between formal order and the energy of nature, which appears as colour, gesture, lyricism, luminosity and accident. Geometric or architecture forms are rendered in translucent layers of colour. The inspiration for this series came from Roman frescoes. I was attracted to the strange colours and battered surfaces of these ancient wall paintings, as well as to their visionary architectural spaces, enriched with columns, urns, swags, garlands and masks. As the series progressed, I distilled these ideas to their simplest possible form so that brushwork and colour relationships become the central focus."