| Wednesday, August 13,
2003 - The Globe and Mail
Two feet in the past
Portraitist Kirsten Johnson has turned a white
tube sock and a Stanfield's grey woolly into the subjects of an intriguing
suite of paintings that quietly celebrate the comforts of childhood.
When Toronto painter Kirsten Johnson fell off her bike three years ago,
the last thing on her mind was a new suite of paintings. Left with a
mangled hip, she was bedridden for weeks while strung out on painkillers.
Naturally, Johnson's mind began to drift, and, after the initial
hordes of worried visitors dwindled down to her boyfriend and her
parents, her loneliness caused her to retreat into a childlike state of
self-indulgence. She began to seek solace in old toys, favourite
childhood mo vies, and mushy foods - what she calls the "totems of
comfort."
Once back on her feet and ready to paint, Johnson began talking to
other adults who had undergone traumatic illnesses, and was struck by
how intelligent, grown people will suddenly cling to teddy bears, baby-soft
blankets and sugary treats as part of their healing process. The
resulting series of paintings, Comfort, first shown at Toronto's Zsa Zsa
Gallery in 2001, was a disturbing and yet oddly cheery collection of
portraits of wounded adults sucking their thumbs, wallowing in pajamas
and playing with toys. But one image from Comfort continued to haunt Johnson - that of a young man surrounded by a caressing gaggle of homemade, button-eyed sock puppets. At one point in her convalescence, Johnson says, she had dreamed of hav ing her friends stage a sock-puppet show at the end of her bed - an idea she had nixed because, as she puts it, "I was rapidly using up favours." | |
![]() Johnson's oil-on-chalkboard
giddy: overt infantallism |
Two years later, Johnson has turned her fever dream into a deliciously
strange suite of paintings entitled touchy-feely, and opening
Aug. 7 at Toronto's Burston Gallery. Employing her estimable talents as a
portraitist, Johnson has crafted over 40 paintings of sock puppets,
all in exaggerated poses and expressions - from goofy to malevolent
- and each labelled with literary precision.
|
| A puppet attempting to pull off another puppet's eye is called insistent
while a puppet making a pass at another is labelled drunkenly
amorous. The titles are placed directly on the paintings in
chalk, making the exhibition resemble a very smart child's
summer-camp scrapbook.
Johnson is unapologetic about touchy-feely's overt infantilism.
"I'm hardly alone here - there is
a purity to nostalgia, because you know how the story ends. That's
why so many people find so-called childish things comforting. We get
rid of a lot as we get older, go through a toughening up, and maybe
that's not an entirely good idea. And I can't do it, can't get rid
of everything from my childhood. I wonder where this idea comes from,
that we have to get rid of things that once made us happy?"
Johnson admits that her two puppet models - a plain white tube sock
and that most Canadian of garments, a Stanfield's grey woolly - are,
at first glance, difficult to regard as subjects worthy of fine-art
portraiture, especially since Johnson has applied the same rigour and
meticulousness in her painting of these humble subjects as she would
one of her much coveted portraits.
"Every once in a while I would stop and ask myself: sock puppets? But I had
so much fun making the work, and so much fun getting my friends to play
with the puppets, that I kept going. At one point, I was at a
restaurant with a bunch of friends and the puppets came out. Within
minutes, the whole restaurant was hovering over our table, watching us
manipulate these mangy old socks. I realized then that, as toys,
the puppets had a kind of seductive simplicity - because when all you
have for a toy is a sock, the toy naturally becomes all about you
and your imagination."
Johnson's enthusiasm for her subjects has paid off. When immersed
in the paintings, the viewer begins to see subtle differences between the two
characters: and Johnson's almost fanatical attention to detail, to the
way the fabric folds, curls in on itself and hangs, like skin off the
puppeteers' hands, gradually gives the two worn-out socks distinct
personalities and a palpable physicality. What could have been a handicap
- hyperrealist applies talents to seemingly mundane subject - instead
becomes the method by which Johnson imbues the paintings with life
and character.
"I've always enjoyed taking the sting out of formal painting. I love
the classical style, but hate the stuffiness, the museum feel of that
style," she says. "But the process, puppets or people, is the same. I
became just as obsessed with accurately recording their emotions as I
do with live subjects."
"For months," Johnson laughs, "I tried to get them to express
co-dependency. I had to work my way through coquettish to mutually
apologetic before I got it right."
As the interview progresses, I begin to wonder if Johnson is suffering
from Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy syndrome, becoming a little too
attached to her hosiery pals. "Well, at least I didn't give them names ... although I do think of the tube sock as Her and the woolly as Him, because it's bigger," she says. "But now they're sitting on my studio shelf, looking like they want to be played with again. Or at least washed." | |
| Saturday, August 30,
2003 * Toronto Star
Socks speak a thousand words
Art By Numbers
- PETER GODDARD
For one thing, she was lonely. She wanted company. She wanted to be
amused, the way it should be when you're a kid and sick in bed.
Specifically, she wanted her friends to put on sock puppet shows for her.
"The fact is, I don't remember having any sock puppet show when I was a
child," says Johnson.
"But I'm part of that generation" - she celebrates her 36th birthday
tomorrow at the closing of her show at The Burston Gallery - "that grew
up with Sesame Street and the Muppets. I loved all those guys. Since then
I loved all do-it-yourself toys."
In 2001 she mounted "Comfort," her earlier show to reflect her
fascination with childhood revisited at Zsa Zsa gallery, where she showed
painted baby toys and a pair of sock puppets.
The models for the sock-puppet drawings are - uh, well, sock puppets.
Two socks, one a grey work sock with a red stripe, the other a more
uptown, genteel all-white sock. In Drunkenly Amorous the pair appear
to be mating while in Insistent they're having a good old-fashioned
sock fight.
Johnson toyed with the idea of bringing her sock models to this
show's opening a while back "and maybe write a play for them to be in,"
she says. "But the socks have been used so much they're falling apart.
It would have been too much of a letdown."
The specific sock puppet title she begins with isn't always the
title that ends up for any particular painting. "Oh, I'd start with a
very specific idea," she explains. "I'd want 'paranoia.' But when it was
finished I'd think, "no, that's more 'rambunctious' than 'paranoia.'
The 'rambunctious' sock had such a feeling of giddiness and complete
energy. But then people would come up and say, 'oh, that's not
'rambunctious,' that's whatever.' I've had to learn not to try to
control my paintings." | |
| 1 Socks: "I find them so charming and I like the fact they're so utilitarian. There's something about childhood here. I think that people are never really finished with their childhood. There's so much more to explore about childhood, so much more to explain. When I first started doing this I remember going out with my friends - we're all in our 30s or 40s - and we'd play with the sock puppets in a restaurant. We'd scream and laugh and the waiter would come by and make sure we weren't drunk I've always worked with emotion. And you get as much emotion out of working with socks as with humans." | ![]() Drunkenly Amorous (2003), by Kirsten Johnson |
|
2 Painting with chalk: "Oil paint is my first love. But I wanted
something to suggest school and using chalk and blackboards did that.
There's also something impermanent working with chalk. That was the most
fun. Oil painting is careful work. With chalk, you could rub things out
I made all the blackboards as well. It was wood over which I put blackboard
paint. And there is something called 'blackboard paint.' You could get a
whole can of it and paint your whole room. Part of my studio has
blackboard paint."
3 Faces: "With each sock puppet there's something unique and un-human
about it. Yet each does express human-like emotion. But then I think we're
looking for ourselves everywhere we look, at everything we look at. We
look for ourselves in our cats. Human loneliness is pretty big so we
want to find ourselves every place, especially in the humble sock." "Touchy-Feely," Kirsten Johnson's paintings of sock puppets, wraps up today and tomorrow at The Burston Gallery, 1092 Queen St. W. (at Dovercourt). The gallery is open noon to 5p.m. today, 1p.m. to 5p.m. tomorrow. | |
| The Globe and Mail, August 23, 2003 |
|
GALLERY GOING - Gary Michael Dault Kirsten Johnson at the Burston Gallery Okay, what's cuter - and more grotesque - than a sock puppet? Not much, right? The production and proliferation of Cute, on the other hand, is not perhaps the most promising direction for an artist. It was with something like a heavy heart, therefore, that I finally assayed these surprising sock puppet paintings by Toronto artist Kirsten Johnson (the exhibition is called Touchy Feely, after all).
The idea for the show came, Johnson recounts in a
gallery statement, from her convalescence in the
fall of 2000, after being knocked off her bike by a car.
It occurred to Johnson that it would be "cheering"
if she could only "convince my friends to come over and
entertain me with a sock puppet show" (how many
painkillers was this woman being given?). This never
happened, unfortunately, so Johnson made the puppets
herself.
She made two of them anyhow. And given that, as she points out, "her work
has always been portrait-based," she set about painting the portraits
of her two companionable sock puppets - one has big buttons for eyes
while the other sees with two huge wooden beads.
This is not very interesting yet. But what Johnson did then is to press
the puppets into service as the exemplars of a whole absorbing range of
emotional states.
Placed against black or green backgrounds reminiscent of school
blackboards, these exquisitely painted little woolly characters (who possess
a certain Bert and Ernie vaudevillianism) act out - either together or
separately - such states of being as "paranoid," "demure," "intense,"
"co-dependent," "lascivious," "self-absorbed" and what seems like
hundreds (the show is very large) of other moods that flesh is heir to.
Just so you don't have to guess which emotion or state is being acted out
by the puppets, the artist has carefully printed it beside her puppets,
in pink chalk. I'm not at all clear about why Johnson uses chalk and
blackboard-grounds against which to position her little passion plays.
But they sure are charming. And really very skillfully painted. $500-$750. Until Aug. 31,1092 Queen St. W., 416-516-1232. |
| How to make painting a performance art | ![]() Works by Kirsten Johnson, including Valerie B: Portrait of a Canadian Movie Star, show lots of drama |
NOW Magazine, May 6, 1999
by Si Si Peñaloza "Kirsten Johnson is a star. She's
well known for her dramatic work, most recently in David Cronenberg's
eXistenZ and Don McKellar's Last Night. But I don't mean movie star.
She's got more star quality than you can capture on celluloid. She has a
'brightness'. And you can see it in her vibrant paintings. |
.....Johnson
makes local thespians and starlets the subject, or cast. of her work. Elaborate set-ups
From the look of this eclectic apartment, it's easy to see why
Johnson's often the talk of the green room. She brings a painting from the
back and props it up against her old ElectroHome 78s record player. The
Love Letter depicts a woman in a ball gown crushing a pomegranate. The
characters in her painted dramas strike unnatural, theatrical poses. It's
as if Johnson exploits for her own devices the dramatic conventions of the
tableau. The result is an image as emotionally charged as any theatrical
presentation.
This is only one of many areas in which Johnson's
experience as an actor crosses over to her position as a painter. Her
awareness of the audience differs from that of a painter who's never had to
delight an expectant crowd. Her subjects are painted using their eyes and
gestures to engage the viewer. After all, they're actors doing what they
do best - or perhaps Johnson's brush instinctively makes her subjects
active.
Seize and arrest ...Her sense of audience also influences how Johnson positions
women in her panels. Film theorists have been deconstructing the male gaze
for nearly two decades. Johnson builds it up, confronting the gaze head-on.
Rather than being chosen for their poetic value, gestures here are intended
to actively subvert assumptions about the gaze. It's seize and arrest, to
the point where you wonder who's doing the gazing, the subject or the
spectator.
'When I first started painting, I was influenced by the
Pre-Raphaelites, but they also filled me with horror - the way women were
painted as vacant - blank slates to project upon. I had a love/hate
relationship with that. I still love the formality of the paintings, but
the female subject's lack of self-possession alienated me.'
Plenty of attitude
...In some of her smaller portraits, she's taken a hammer to the pompous
gilded-frame idea. Literally. On frame is riddled with nails and covered
with tin. Another is wreathed with shiny metal coils. With all their
hardware, the paintings have plenty of attitude, much of it directed toward
the overserious and formalist old school of oil painting. Especially
portraits. Self-Portrait as a Royal Brat is rooted in Johnson's sense of humour.
She reclines decadently, mouth in a pout and tongue poised. A thin paintbrush
is held idly in her hand as if it were a fashion accessory or magic wand.
It's a revealing portrait of an uncompromised artist for whom the footlights
never dim. 'I've always considered myself way too much of an extrovert to be just a
painter, and way too much of an introvert to be just an actor. One is an
inward, solitary art while the other is social and collaborative.'"
|
|
Artery, Fall/Winter 1999 from September Season Review by Phil Anderson "20th Century
Sideshow (presented by blueprint gallery) featured strong and varied work of
12 visual artists. ...........Upon entering the exhibition the viewer encounters
some of the most striking works of the show with Kirsten Johnson's oil on wood
panels Self Portrait Post Suckerpunch and Two Out of Three Furies.
" |
![]() |
The Twisted Superfreak Times, 1999
"It's bad enough she's strawberry blonde, brilliant, charismatic and funny,
but she's the accomplished mistress of two disciplines that require utmost
talent and dedication. When not 'wowing' theatre-goers on stage and screen,
Kirsten paints. Really paints. Her show of recent work at the Zsa Zsa
Gallery (962 Queen St. W.) proves that in the decade since I had the honor
of sitting for her, she hasn't been spreading herself too thin.
This is meticulous, refined work. Kirsten takes hyper-realistic portraiture
a few steps left of center with stylized poses and a blazing impossible
pallette, reminiscent of Viennese Successionists like Klimt or Schiele.
Fresh tones are particularly exaggerated; electric blues and raw magentas
follow the line of muscle and tendon, so, at times, her subjects appear
partially flayed. Brush strokes are confident, languorously graceful,
yet she can capture the texture of stiff lace, a rough wool carpet or
foaming champagne with a brisk stippled effect.
From the coquettish 'Portrait of Valerie B.' To the eerie,
understated violence of 'The Lobby', theme and mood are varied. 'Red Rage'
shows, in almost Biblical composition,
the anguish of a dysfunctional family. The contemptuous, tragic gaze with
which the woman in 'The Love Letter' confronts the viewer is truly
disturbing." by Leslea Keurvorst
|
Lola - Winter 1999
"Recent Paintings at Zsa Zsa.
Kirsten Johnson's great big bold portraits of her friends in the theatre
community are painted in stagey, dramatic poses that Johnson has worked up
from photographs. She finds all those improbable but real greens and blues
and oranges in skin tones and bravely and adeptly attacks complex textures,
especially fabrics. The paintings are contained in fabulous home-made
frames created out of stuff like nails and twisted metal. ('I cut myself
soo many times....', Johnson) 'Self Portrait as a Royal Brat'
embodies the humorous, lively, deceptively powerful collection. Note
the devil kitty - a disturbing childhood toy. Who says portraits in
oils are passé? You go, Kirsten."
by Sarah B. Hood
| XTRA magazine, 1999 |
The Globe and Mail, March 5, 1996
(for Book Review of "What Passes for Love") by John Doyle
"......Then there are the startling illustration by Toronto artist Kirsten
Johnson - in each case a cool, deadpan accompaniment to the story."
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