Painting a life

By JUSTIN HARMON/Staff

Bright colors and moving people are the hallmarks of Nancy Johnson’s paintings, but one element stands out more than any other: history.
Her studio in the Arts Depot in Abingdon can almost be read like a timeline. There are scenes of her mother nursing Johnson and one of her sisters, her father making apple butter and Johnson herself being baptized. Little moments in her and others’ lives frozen forever on canvas.
“It’s folk art,” she explains.
Johnson also dabbles with collages, putting hair or other textures on her paintings to make something entirely different.
“I just like to use things to create,” she said.
The pictures in Johnson’s studio aren’t photorealistic or overly gilded. Many of them are very simple. But that is how Johnson planned it.
“It’s the vision of your eyes. It’s how someone sees things,” she said.
She said when she goes out to talk about her art, she always makes that point. It doesn’t need to be phenomenal in a technical sense in order to be good.
“If you paint a cow and it looks like a cow to you and you’re satisfied, well then that’s good enough,” she said, laughing.
Johnson could almost be one of her own creations hanging on the wall. Not more than a few minutes will go by without a bright laugh or colorful bit of history. She isn’t terse by any means, but her words are deliberate, her stories simple and yet nothing is without meaning. Even with smiles, she’s just as serious about her passions as her subjects.
“I’m a challenger. I tried to prove to myself what I can do,” she said. “It’s how we were raised.”
Much of Johnson’s inspiration comes from her mother. According to Johnson, she was akin to Mother Teresa in that she was always helping people; at home as a mother, at work as a nurse and at large as a good person.
Johnson even wrote a book about her mother titled Raised by Flesh, Wood, and Plastic, referring to the fact her mother had been fitted with a fake leg for the majority of her life.
Initially, Johnson’s mother inspired her to go into nursing, a career that spanned 17 years. Once she retired from medicine, she realized she just had too much steam left.
“I wasn’t ready to sit down and die out,” she said. “A lot of people come out of the medical profession and just go home. I’ve got too many things to do.”
According to Johnson, she just up and decided to teach herself how to paint. There had been a number of artists in her family, so she thought “why not me?”
After teaching herself how to put a brush to canvas, Johnson has racked up a number of accomplishments.
She’s sold a number of her paintings over the years to people in and around the region. One painting of a scene from the Underground Railroad sold for $1,100. Another, one of the wolves she painted for the Town of Abingdon’s tourism push sold for $2,500. According to Johnson, there’s a gallery in Bristol that has eight of her paintings.
She’s even unloaded two pieces to famed auction house Sotheby’s.
“I had no idea who that man was,” she said of the Sotheby’s representative that came to look at her work. “He got on my nerves a little bit before he told me who he was.”
Even so, Johnson said the man offered her some good advice about her style: stick with it.
“He said if I go to another style, it probably wouldn’t be what I want it to be,” she said.
She was recently recognized by the Barter Theatre for her “talent, creativity and important contributions… in our region to the arts.” And that, according to Johnson, was a proud moment.
“I didn’t have the slightest idea about any of that,” she said. “It was an honor to be chosen.”
Of course, Johnson isn’t letting the last few years go to her head.
“I’m not the person that wants to be up on a pedestal. I’m a humble person,” she said. “If God wants to put me up there, then good.”
Johnson is currently working on a number of pieces and several concepts and raw materials are stacked around the room in organized piles, waiting for their moment to be pulled together into her next project.
But she’s in no hurry. Johnson will work and create at her own pace. But the one thing that is certain is she’ll work. And work. And work.
And the work will continue until Johnson finds another calling.
“It’s fun for me,” she said. “When it’s not fun anymore, I’ll quit.”
Justin Harmon can be reached at 628-7101 or jharmon@wythenews.com