Lucas Johnson

Lucas Johnson (October 24, 1940 – August 31, 2002) was an American artist and major force in the Texas art scene from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. Largely self-taught, he mastered numerous techniques, including egg tempera, pen and ink drawing, silverpoint, oil and acrylic painting, and the printmaking disciplines of aquatint, etching, lithography, serigraphy, drypoint and mezzotint. He was inspired by politics, music, fishing and the culture of Mexico, where he lived for a decade. His unique vision found expression in a wide range of subjects, from haunting, shamanic beings and quirky aquatic life to enigmatic, volcanic landscapes and still lifes of the orchid species he collected and cultivated.

Early life Johnson was born in Hartford, Connecticut on October 24, 1940. At the age of seven, his family relocated to San Gabriel, California. At some point in elementary school, the youngster visited the Huntington Library on a class field trip. This first encounter with serious art, specifically Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy, would shape Johnson's life.

After graduating high school, Johnson enrolled at the University of California-Los Angeles to pursue a degree in marine biology. But, realizing his true calling as that of an artist, he dropped out before his junior year. During his stay in New Orleans, Johnson befriended figurative artist George Tooker, who encouraged the young painter to try his hand at egg tempera, Tooker's medium of choice. At the time, Mexico City's avant garde art community was rebelling against its predecessors, the "Big Three" of the mural movement, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Painters of the new generation were looking to widen their horizons by embracing European and American artistic influences.

Work Johnson's oeuvre has been characterized as "imagist", a term that usually refers to a short-lived, early-20th century poetic style. Related to Surrealism, Imagism was advanced by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), among others. Similar to Surrealism, Imagist art, whether written or visual, employs recognizable figures, locations and objects, but juxtaposes them in fantastic or unreal ways, as metaphors.

Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, Texas Houston Airport System, Houston, Texas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, Texas Menil Collection, Houston, Texas San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas Jose Luis Cuevas Museum of Drawings, Mexico City, Mexico Museum of Modern Art, Tel Aviv, Israel Toledo Museum, Oaxaca, Mexico National Museum, Warsaw, Poland Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts Smithsonian Institution, American Graphics Collection, Washington, D.C. United States Embassy Permanent Collection, Mexico, D.F. Brooklyn Library, Brooklyn, New York Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, Texas University of Houston Print Collection, Houston, Texas Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico Mexican Museum, San Francisco, California Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, California Amarillo Art Center, Amarillo, Texas Instituto Mexicano-Norteamericano, Mexico, D.F. University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, Illinois Wichita Falls Museum, Wichita Falls, Texas Museum of Fine Arts at the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico Museo Jose Luis Cuevas, Mexico City, Mexico Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee Fibracel de Mexico, Mexico, D.F. Malone and Hyde, Memphis, Tennessee General Motors Foundation Permanent Traveling Collection Bank of the Southwest, Houston, Texas Wilson Industries, Houston, Texas Andrews and Kurth, Houston, Texas

Solo exhibitions Johnson's solo exhibitions include the following. In 2006, Houston Artists Fund published a 183-page hardbound book, The Art and Life of Lucas Johnson, with a preface by acclaimed museum director Walter Hopps and an illustrated chronology by Patricia Covo Johnson.

In the book's opening essay, former Kimbell Museum director Edmund P. Pillsbury sums up the artist's life, "Johnson became a painter to express himself first and foremost as a human being. At its core, his work is a metaphor for the social condition - an expression of an abiding preoccupation with what is human or, conversely, with what reveals a lack of humanity."