Propeller Member Since 2007
Lisa Johnson graduated with honours from the Ontario College of Art and Design, where she also won the prestigious Mrs. W.O. Forsythe Award for 4th-year women painters in 1996.
Lisa Johnson’s work has been shown in solo and group shows throughout Ontario and her work is in private and corporate collections in Canada, the U.S.A., Europe and Asia.
Lisa Johnson’s paintings inquire into space and movement within the context of landscape painting. Through her ethereal and sculpted pigment, Johnson depicts vast landscapes where figures seem to poetically emerge. Drawing inspiration from on-location studies to develop large studio works, her paintings weave geographic, corporeal, and abstract sensibilities through layers of atmospheric grounds and gestural mark-making. Her work speaks to the passage of time over an evolving landscape painted with spirit and musicality.
While Johnson was born in Toronto, her family’s roots in the shield country of North Frontenac – specifically Bon Echo, Mazinaw Lake – continue to serve as one of her prime sources of inspiration. Bon Echo is a stunning 100-meter pre-Cambrian cliff a mile long the rises straight from the dark waters of one of the deepest lakes in Ontario. This is a location that has drawn artists for centuries – from Algonquin artists who created pictographs along the meeting of rock and water, to the group of seven members who painted at this location during the heyday of the “Bon Echo Inn”. It is a magical Canadian landscape that Johnson sees as a powerful reminder of nature’s spirit and poetry and a potent muse for ongoing painterly enquiries.
