Paying homage to a painter and their work is a humbling task, especially when the artist is Dorothy Churchill-Johnson, who recently passed away in Santa Barbara, her home and artist studio for nearly 50 years. She held not only a special place of honor in the national landscape of American painters, but also in the hearts of the creative community in which she worked. Everyone who knew or admired her, or collected her work will miss her talent, dedication to the arts, and her vibrant intellect. She carved out a style of painting that is challenging to label or artistically to match.
The only way to describe her paintings is to imagine what you might see if you tripped and fell flat on a sidewalk and opened your eyes and saw a tiny pebble, a bug, and a blade of grass resting in a crack. At eye level, the objects seem larger than you ever imagine them upright and more important to the pavement below that held your steps before you fell. How interesting. Or perhaps you buy a tweed jacket and find one tiny thread dangling. As you try to put it back in place, you notice thousands of threads that create a pattern. The jacket becomes more meaningful in its detail than the person who might wear it. Hence, Dorothy’s headless, Neo-Pop men’s-suit series, which, like all of her work, attracts international attention from gallerists and collectors. Taking this imagery one step further, if you have had the good fortune to stand beside one of her giant 5’ x 6’ canvases of the inner images in a kaleidoscope, you will not only feel very small, you might also experience what it feels like to be part of the light reflections on colorful stones and gems.
Dorothy’s paintings help us understand the details and patterns of our environment, the close-up views we might take for granted — the moth in the leaves, the flower’s petal, or the thread in the tweed. “Through observation I hope to elevate the mundane to the extraordinary,” she indicated in an interview. Dorothy elevated what the pedestrian eye might miss when focusing only on the whole. All details mattered. Dorothy took nothing for granted in creating her art or her life.
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