testimonials

“Ken Johnson has a delightful talent for acute perception of ‘mood’ in the landscape.  His keen sensibility can embrace that exquisite quietness of sea and estuary – a theme largely untouched in Australian art.

Ken has staggering compositional skills where he never ceases to surprise the eye, his technical éclat that so delights me never leaves a passage of paint that bores.

Artist John Olsen AO, OBE

Ken Johnson’s creative unpredictability ensures that his audiences remain poised to participate in his search for a personal vision of the world that he describes as “a shrinking circle”.  His artistic thread flows strongly, interlaced with life and a flint of post-modernism, exploring countries and the richness and diversity of their cultures, overcoming difficult challenges en route.  Metaphors such as roads, doors and insets are evident in the processes of interpreting the subjects undertaken. 

Significantly, his 1975 visit to Japan embraces a geometric evaluation using postulates of Euclidean axioms to direct the analysis of his theatrical subjects, including Kabuki and Noh plays.  This continuity of form stabilizes the surface, individuating the subjects, balancing the painted space with its possible subsequent metamorphosis.  Ken deducts a principle that may align with Cubist decomposition and construction, from which we can unequivocally recognise post-modern conditions towards the end of the twentieth century.

Nothing is superfluous or taken for granted.  Similar to the richness and variety of a love letter, his art, particularly his Antarctic paintings, participates in the human and clamorous aspect of landscape and its beauty, from deserts of fire to deserts of ice, to ecological awareness of the fragilities of the planet.

Ken Johnson has bent the meaning of depth with his approach to interpreting the landscape and human imagery using lines and insets.  These are geometric metaphors and conceptual scansions of distance that evolve into a visionary representation.

Prof Zeno Birolli

Zeno Birolli is a professor of Art History at the Brera Academy of Milan and the Albertina Academy in Turin.  One of the leading experts on Futurism, he wrote fundamental monographic studies and was an authority on Umberto Boccioni. He studied the painter Osvaldo Licini and curated his exhibition in 1968 at the Galleria Civica in Turin.  There he also presented significant exhibitions of Cy Twombly in 1969 and Gastone Novelli and Fausto Melotti in 1972.  He organised and was director, from 1979 to 1981, of the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan.    Professor Birolli has curated other contemporary art exhibitions at museums throughout Europe, including Musee d’art Moderne, Pompidou, Beaubourg, Paris and is the author of numerous books and essays on contemporary modern and late Renaissance art.