You know, one thing students asked me in the questions is, you know, how do I use color to evoke mood and I don't think you can use color and not evoke mood. I mean, whether whether you're purposefully doing that or not, we all have a sensory response to color and its configurations that that is undeniable.
Taking familiar places and seeing them in a new light is a gift that many artists give us whether it's a reinterpretation of a familiar song, or artwork that invokes multiple emotions at the same time. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. Today we're talking with a landscape artist who picks familiar subjects and picks certain moments to reflect these places in a new yet familiar light.
My name is Doug Johnson, and currently I teach painting at Heartland Community College although in the past, I've taught everything from 19th century art history to art appreciation, and drawing. I'm also the executive director of the McLean County Art Center, and I'm a painter holding bachelor's and master's degrees from Illinois State University and Masters of Fine Arts degree from Northern Illinois University. Currently, I have an exhibition of landscape paintings in the Macaulay Geller,
so the Macaulay gallery is at Heartland Community College, it's a smaller gallery and allows for exhibits. I think in the case of yours, maybe there's eight to 10 paintings that are on display.
Yeah, I think that's right about the size. And it's really actually lovely size for solo show, because you can pick a wide variety of things and viewers can get a whole experience, but actually pretty quickly. But it's large enough to that you can bring a whole class. And that's happened a couple of times where classes have come in and discuss the work. And that's been pretty rewarding, actually.
So how would you describe this collection of yours that is presented? It's called a sense of place. What does that mean? And for those maybe listening to this, but haven't seen any examples? How would you describe that collection?
Well, I'm a painter, and I paint in acrylic. And these works were all paintings that were done, essentially based on local scenes. So you know, I have everything depicted from the wash house and Clinton Street in Bloomington, to the car lock green elevator to kind of a random residential house and Leroy. So what I typically do is go out and look for something that really speaks to me. And part of that is certainly nostalgia. But But beyond that, I'm looking for very particular types of light, which is why most of the paintings are based on source material where I take photos in either the golden hours of morning or dusk, and then work to really bring up those paintings in a fresh and interesting way so that people can re experience something maybe they're already somewhat familiar with, but see it in a new light. Well, I'd like to
get into some of the specifics of those subjects and what struck you about them in just a moment. But as you mentioned, this is in a way kind of a community based collection. These are things that if you are leaving from the Joe McCauley gallery, at Heartland Community College off ramp road, in normal, you could drive to some of these locations within 1015 minutes, or maybe you know, a half an hour if you go out of town a little bit for some of these subjects, all pretty close. And this brings in something that I was curious about in your role as an artist. But also with those other hats you talked about earlier, you work as an educator, you work as the director of the McLean County Art Center. And that part of that is managing the Sugar Creek Arts Festival. So I can see that as having to require a bit of balance to do all of that, especially because in a way you're well known in the community for your role with the MC AC and the Sugar Creek Arts Festival, in addition to your role as a painter, so you kind of have to serve as a bit of a gatekeeper for artists looking display their work, I'm sure. Really what you do is kind of help them. But you also don't have to go out and do the same thing and look for ways to exhibit your work. So how do you balance that?
Yeah, well, I think in every single role I have, it's about stewardship. It's about helping to facilitate other people's success, and finding the avenues which can encourage and promote those individuals to achieve their next step, whatever that next step may be. And if I'm really honest, you know, when I was an undergraduate at ISU, I was a resident assistant. And in some ways, every job I've had since I was an RA in Waterson towers in the in the mid 80s has been kind of the same thing you know, where you're working with complicated communities and trying to help develop people and trying to find balance for yourself. You know, for me as a painter, I ended up doing a whole chunk of artwork early in the morning, I was up this morning and painted for a couple hours and got a start on a painting and fixed a couple of problem areas and another painting and, and it just comes down to finding out those things that really matter for me, and then encouraging others to do that. And a lot of all of those things are frankly, it's about achieving some self fulfillment and broader understanding of ourselves and our place in the world and, and how everything's interconnected, because it's all interconnected. You know, the fact that I grew up in Bloomington Normal, and I did tasseled in McLean County, and you know, I had friends lived out in the country, and all of those things reference each other, and it ends up building a pretty rich life.
So you mentioned working on multiple paintings at the same time, while you could find time to do it. As a non painter, this interests me, how do you balance I guess, the creation of a painting, and know when it's time unless maybe you're forced to because you have to go to work to stop and come back to it later. Is there any problem working on multiple things at the same time, or at least have many starts, and not all of them are finished, beginning to end? You go to the movies, and they always show a painter and they just sit out in a field. And it looks like they've painted a masterpiece out in that field from beginning to end? Not very, probably accurate of the process. But what is it like to try to get in that headspace to do that?
Yeah, well, you know, I think we're all trained to do that. I grew up watching TV series, where you were lured on to one bit of narrative to the next and you could be watching, you know, the Waltons, and the Brady Bunch and all these other shows, but you're keeping those narratives together. You're, you're juggling that headspace, and maybe my generation analog with radio shows, who knows, but it just feels like we're trained to be multitasking all the time. And, and so as a result, you know, I think everyone's functioning with a hum of Attention Deficit all the time. For me personally, every painting has various stages where they need to be developed. And so this morning, I worked for 90 minutes on a painting where I'm just kind of blocking in, here's the warm areas, or the cool areas, these are the shapes, here's how you'll be able to achieve the goal of creating an envelope of light, you know, I can I can block that out. And that's, that's fun, because you can make big decisions and big mistakes and fix all that. But then I set it aside, and then I'll pull off something else. And like, oh, gosh, you know, this is really successful, except for these three areas that are bothering me. And so typically, I'll bring a painting back onto my easel 810 15 times during the course of its life. And in the end, it's done when no area shouts at me anymore. And you know, there's the filmmakers who say that no film is ever finished, it's abandoned. And, and there's that element with paintings to you get to a point where you're like, gosh, I love this, but I can love it to death. And I don't want to make something be so stilted. Because I'm still very interested in the characteristics of paint know, how loose can something be applied? How can I infer an area rather than describe an area? How can I build those relationships and color relationships, you know, I work with and this may seem strange, but I work with a really limited palette, you know, I have, I'm looking up at my workspace now I have, you know, 70 different colors of paint. But I could do a whole painting with four colors or five colors, because I'm, I'm working with my essentially a variation of red, yellow, blue, and making grays that are warm and cool and then modulating everything else. And so for me, the success of that is that I can have a real unified painting, because I've made those decisions. And I may occasionally add something in, you know, you look at 19th century English landscape painting, and it's just this wash of green. And sometimes there'll be a little touch of red on someone's scarf or a wagon in the different distance just to build that compliment and make all the colors hold together. And, and I studied with Harold Gregor, and can hold her primer primarily and a lot of that discussion was, you know, what are those color relationships and how can you add that thing? You know, we're always see these images of artists holding up their thumb at a painting, you know, and they're, they're doing two things really. One is they're blocking out an area and seeing how that changes the color relationships. If you take that color out. They're also measuring if that tree is as big as mine thumbnail in that person is about the same size. How does that? How does it work? So some of those things we see in depictions of artists working, are accurate. But you know, I don't think you can be a baseball player and watch many baseball movies and feel that someone has a natural swing. So it's just the same thing.
You mentioned earlier that you teach painting at Heartland and that this exhibit is being used as an educational tool for students who can come in, they can look at it. And part of the exhibit is students are asked to ask you questions, which you answer on video, and there's the video on in the corner of the exhibit? What are some of the best questions to this point that you've been asked about your work by the students?
Well, that's a good question. People ask how long it takes to complete a painting. And that's, I get that question all the time. And it really varies. You know, there's a painting of the two storey White House from Leroy, it's a small painting in kind of the corner of the show, I did that in like 45 minutes, just because it ring true and 45 minutes. But there's other paintings like the a terminal barn with the morning light, that's 60 7080 hours. And I can't even tell you because I cycle through so many paintings at once, you know, you spend a long time with it. Other people have asked me why I picked particular places and and it's because those places have resonated with me, you know, I've never done a load of laundry at the wash house. But I've certainly gone to enough laundromats in my life. But there's something kind of special about that mid century architecture. And the way the light cascades out of those big plate glass windows, you know, it's that international style, which, which actually rose out of the Bauhaus movement in Germany, and then later became what we see for a lot of skyscrapers. So there's this big agenda with what is a fairly utilitarian architectural style, but it's a careworn building. And for me, you know, that history of that architecture in that place, were all lovely. But formally, I was like, oh, you know, this really fantastic fluorescent light cascading into this neighborhood on a great day, and I constructed the whole painting, so I can make those fluorescent lights be that light source. So that was a lot of fun.
Well, and that's interesting, too, because you can tell in the painting, that the washhouse laundromat, what is depicted is probably maybe a little bit later winter, no leaves on the trees, gray skies. But I think what's interesting to me in thinking of your processes, okay, it's very specific to that time of day, and what's happening with the lights in the wash house in the gray sky, and the surroundings. How much of it is in your brain, how much of it is notes, how much of it is photo reference?
You know, I do a lot of cataloging. So I have hard drives full of images are taken. But I often will go out and do scouting, there's a couple of houses in the community in downtown Bloomington, on the south side of that bridge, you know, near that industrial area that we're near where the old KFC used to be that I think, Gosh, that would be that's such a great juxtaposition of the bridge in this place and painted but yet, but it's on my list, you know, and so what I'm always doing is kind of thinking, you know, here's, here's an interesting collision, or here's some great light that I can play with. And sometimes I'll go out with my good camera, or have a DSLR that I'll shoot a lot with, but like the washhouse I, I was driving by as I was heading home from work, and the place just blowed, and it was near dusk and a very gray day, but there was this, this fabulous light coming out. So I pulled in the parking lot across the street, and just with my phone, took a couple photos and didn't really think anything of it. And then I I you know, week later or so I was processing just a catalog of photos about one Gosh, this really this could sing. This could be some fun. So in that case, I I looked at my photo and said, I'm gonna play with this. And, you know, for me, a lot of it comes down to seeing that our entire lives can be fairly special. You know, we often want to set things aside as being you know, this is such a pretty scene, you should paint that kind of philosophy. I don't buy into that. I think you can do anything. I think you can paint anything if it's painted? Well, it can be beautiful. And a lot of that is this embracing what our lives are we can we can spend our lives in monotony. Or we could find the opportunity for Wonder. And I hope that by choosing what are somewhat Bunnell subject matter that it gives me the opportunity to play and it gives others the opportunity to see and frankly and for me to see to so I can appreciate what I have and what we all have.
So there's one painting in particular to there's a lot of them that really struck me And it's interesting, the more I have the opportunity to go the exhibit, and there's one I wanted to ask you about, because I think it's a good example of taking something that might be banal or even ugly, finding something in there with with light, and with color that take something that you would not necessarily see with a non artist's eye. And it's kind of beautiful. So the painting is of the car lock elevator. It's a bigger painting, it looked familiar to me. First of all, because I've seen the car lock elevator, it's just one of those tall almost kind of tower, but squared off barn type elevators, an older one near railroad tracks. And, and it had a familiarity with me. And I don't know why this is might sound strange to you. But it actually reminded me of a painting by Edward Hopper. That's in the Museum of Modern Art, that's just this tall, old, far more ornate house. But the part that really struck me is you include the road. And in the road, there's something that many of us have seen 1000s of times, is by the shoulder, there's ruts where a truck has gone off into the road backed up, or maybe gone in and had to get back on the road. And there's just a puddle of a muddy rut of a couple of tire tracks. And that is something that I think if you looked at it in life, you would just say that's ugly mud puddle. But the fact that the moment you chose the light bounces off of the water in that rut. And I'm wondering did that was that something that you thought? Ah, that's an interesting interaction? Or is it just something that emerged as you're like, Well, this is part of the, of the scene at that time?
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, ultimately, anytime there's water in the road, and you get or in a field, and you get this sky, reflecting, that builds, it's a terrific, terrific tool to punctuate one space with another space. And so they can reflect each other and you get to bring those, whatever this color color of the sky is back to the ground and bounce up and build those references. And so yeah, I mean, I'm very deliberate with my compositions. And there are things that are edited out, there are things that are included, which may seem superfluous, but oftentimes, they'll provide a color note or a value punctuation. And in that case, that long curving arc of the road, which makes up you know, a huge portion of the of the pictorial space, needed a bit of a foil, because it's this, you know, blue gray slab. And so that punctuation of the reflected light in the puddle was a perfect Formula Element, and a lot of fun to paint.
Was that something where in your photo reference, you saw that? Or was it something that just being familiar, you would know that there would be something like that there?
That was a day actually, I was coming back from a conference in Galesburg, and it was really just beautiful light that evening. That was October evening. And so I pulled in to town to see you know, what the architecture was there. And I you know, I was in school, I'd been to Carla a couple times, but I was just really struck with that orange glow, that yellow glow of the light across the elevator, and then you look for, if that's there, if that yellow bit is there, is there things that I can push to purple, so I can build my color orchestrations. And I have to ultimately, you know, I can take 30 photos to kind of see what's going to work. But you know, I'm looking for those elements that I can relate to. And then the nice thing is, you know, I have a friend, I didn't know this, of course, I have a friend whose father back in the 40s, had been the manager of that green elevator. So you create something and you're you're thinking about lights and all those issues, light and color. And then you find there's this connective tissue that we have. You mentioned Hopper, and of course, I love Hopper, I don't think you can grow up going to the Institute of Chicago like I did, and, and not just have a deep affinity for Hopper, both in his handling of subject matter but also mood. And there's a lot of autumn scenes in the show. And I thought that a terminal sense of loss is one of the themes that I'll touch on pretty frequently, just because there's a there's a resonance to playing with those palettes. You know, one thing students asked me in the questions is, you know, how do I use color to evoke mood and I don't think you can use color and not evoke mood. I mean, whether whether you're purposefully doing that or not. We all have a sensory response to color and its configurations that that is undeniable. In my case, I'm looking at greeting harmonies, and in the same way that musicians play with major and minor chords. I'm working with, you know, warm and cool palettes in order to build a composition that allows the viewer to take in its own way a musical journey through majors and minors.
Well, Doug, thanks so much for taking some time to talk to us about this exhibit and your work and how your life and work intertwine and teach us a little bit about painting.
You know, it's been a great pleasure to have an exhibition at Heartland both to interact with the students and for to share the work with the community. There's been a whole lot of folks that have come in to see the show. And you know, my role at the Art Center have to be pretty careful about not imposing myself upon our program calendar because I'm there to support the artists of the of the community more largely. So I was honored to be asked and I appreciate the opportunity.
Douglas C. Johnson is a painter, Executive Director of the McLean County Art Center and teaches art at Heartland Community College. He joins us today to talk about his exhibit a sense of place at the Joe McCauley gallery on Heartland normal campus. If you're interested in other interviews about art, music, history, and much, much more, subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you found this episode. Thanks for listening
