S T A T E M E N T
Atom Johnson
The world we know is perceived through our senses, and understood through our capacity to weave those perceptions into narrative. Facts in the context of story become knowledge. But each of us are uniquely calibrated. Our stories differ. One’s experience of reality inevitably varies from another’s. This can simultaneously intrigue and frustrate.
Art -- whether in the form of film, fiction, prose, sculpture, etc. -- enlarges and challenges our perceptions of reality. We love story – the more unusual and varied the better -- yet we struggle with the tendency of wanting to conform the rest of the world to our own personal visions of reality. We are complicated, contradictory, intricate beings.
The goal of PAINTSMITHink has been to pursue creative effects in paint and prose as a way of exploring these perceptions of reality. I am – and have been -- interested in pursuing that artistic vision through the filters of fictional characters, primarily an artist named Atom Johnson.
Atom is a being of heightened awareness, at times seemingly manic in his fascination with the details of our human life on this earth. His version of the paintings he creates goes as follows:
Light, texture, color, beauty, the hidden landscape of the soul. Craftsmanship. Luminous potential. Something called faith. These are the generators, the springs of my inspiration.
Employing a contemporary interpretation of ancient painting techniques -- east meets west, a sort of fresco/nihonga fusion! -- by means of marble dust, dry historical earth pigments and a wide range of binders and mediums, these ATOMscape™ paintings represent an abstract iconography transcending religious or denominational categories. They are internally balanced, of themselves, visual meditation spaces whose meticulously crafted optical terrain is meant to reflect something spiritual in the nature of the viewer, a sort of -- why not? -- Rorschach test of the soul.
They are a physical manifestation of an abiding enchantment with the great mystery of existence; with the texture of the visible and the geography of the invisible.
Darrel Robert Spenst
(aka Atom Johnson)
Art -- whether in the form of film, fiction, prose, sculpture, etc. -- enlarges and challenges our perceptions of reality. We love story – the more unusual and varied the better -- yet we struggle with the tendency of wanting to conform the rest of the world to our own personal visions of reality. We are complicated, contradictory, intricate beings.
The goal of PAINTSMITHink has been to pursue creative effects in paint and prose as a way of exploring these perceptions of reality. I am – and have been -- interested in pursuing that artistic vision through the filters of fictional characters, primarily an artist named Atom Johnson.
Atom is a being of heightened awareness, at times seemingly manic in his fascination with the details of our human life on this earth. His version of the paintings he creates goes as follows:
Light, texture, color, beauty, the hidden landscape of the soul. Craftsmanship. Luminous potential. Something called faith. These are the generators, the springs of my inspiration.
Employing a contemporary interpretation of ancient painting techniques -- east meets west, a sort of fresco/nihonga fusion! -- by means of marble dust, dry historical earth pigments and a wide range of binders and mediums, these ATOMscape™ paintings represent an abstract iconography transcending religious or denominational categories. They are internally balanced, of themselves, visual meditation spaces whose meticulously crafted optical terrain is meant to reflect something spiritual in the nature of the viewer, a sort of -- why not? -- Rorschach test of the soul.
They are a physical manifestation of an abiding enchantment with the great mystery of existence; with the texture of the visible and the geography of the invisible.
Darrel Robert Spenst
(aka Atom Johnson)