Artist profile: John Johnson

“VISION IS THE ART OF SEEING THINGS invisible,” Jonathan Swift said. My “Doublejay Vision” also is the art of seeing the unseen connections. I find various elements, record them with my digital camera and enhance them to make something new.

I am a photo illustrator, using my computer screen as my canvas and software as the tool to form and reshape the images. Like a sculptor, I stretch, add and remove, smooth and reshape, until my art is revealed.

I use photography to achieve my results but don’t consider myself to be primarily a photographer. I am an artist and an inter- preter. I am unabashedly a pictorialist. I don’t do straight photography. There are tons of great portrait and landscape photographers out there, and I’m not trying to compete with them.

I love to create exotic scenes from mun-dane subjects and offer no apologies for “stepping all over” a picture I have taken. I combine elements from different pictures to create new ones, attempting to create scenes that have “the ring of truth.”

I’m also into “in-your-face” colors. I was always a fan of Kodachrome during my college years at CSU Chico. Then my photography evolved into electronic art somewhere in the ’80s, when I created my first computer-based art on one of the earliest color computers, an Amiga 1000.

I “drew” a picture of a flamingo, pixel by pixel, and sold it to a magazine. I wasn’t a pioneer, per se, but I was one of the earliest “settlers.” For the final paper for myPhilosophy 101 class, I had to label and explain my own philosophy of life. With the help of some cheap wine, I was able to get in touch with my muse and came up with Pragmatic Hedonism: “Whatever works to make me happy.”

I am compelled to entertain, and I find that spreading joy brings me happiness. My humor is evident in most of my work, whether in the pictures, their titles or both. I’m sure God has cursed me for some unknown slight, because, so help me, I do love puns—verbal and visual.

I hope and pray that someday my penance will have been paid and all will be forgiven.

Doublejay Visions Art Studio
916-772-9448, doublejayvisions.com
Plowed Fields and Windmills

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