A Rolling Interview with Teddy Johnson
Teddy Johnson's paintings play with the traditions of Western Art to explore storytelling, history, perception, and culture. Linda Matney Gallery has showcased the meditative and layered works of this prolific painter since 2011, and he is among several artists the gallery represents who studied at the University of Georgia. We recently caught up with him about his work as an artist and curator in the Baltimore area.
John Lee Matney: So we really enjoy having your work in the exhibit. Please tell us more about the two pieces we are showing in Works on Paper
Teddy Johnson: The two pieces I have up in the gallery were created last summer in Chianti, a region in Italy. And, in particular, this was in La Macina di San Cresci outside of Greve, a community about 10 miles outside of Florence. So I went there last summer for a week, just a week. But it was a residency where I spent really every moment painting. One of the things I wanted to do there was to capture the experience of the space as a way to feed into my paintings at home right now.
So I've been working in many ways from my mind's eye for my other works that I've shown at the Matney Gallery.These are different. Their original intention was to feed into the other work. But something that happened when I was there is I actually got quite excited about the experience of what it means to be in space. So essentially, I was at this sort of Romanesque church and its church buildings and some of these buildings that date back a thousand years that were beautifully situated in the earth and felt pretty timeless. And so I got really interested in watching the light pass through the space and being in tune with how the environment patterns moved around me there. It can be engaging in a space that's been there that long. It gets you thinking about what came before you, what's continuous in the world, and what changes. And, so, you know, every day, these paintings were part of it. I found a spot and spent the day with that spot trying to capture something about it. So one of the images is from the walled garden looking out into the valley below. And another image is underneath, I believe, a chestnut tree looking at one of the buildings of the church. So these are religious buildings, but now they're residential buildings or at least in part so, you know, families have lived in these spaces for I would assume, hundreds of years.
And so they're comfortable in the space. So, you know, the one with the, with the chestnut tree, and I had spent that time watching the light kind of move across the building, but also you could smell the food being cooked inside so you could think about what it is like to live with those spaces. So that's a lot. What was going on in my mind is being in the open air and thinking about place and thinking about that sort of finite moment of being somewhere just entirely different than a painting where I might spend six months or more on a group of paintings where I go into them over and over again. And those paintings capture hundreds of ideas in my mind. They encapsulate many things, but these paintings in the gallery right now are much more encapsulating a moment.
They're one-shot paintings. I've worked with landscape painting throughout my entire career as an artist. I've showcased it in different ways. So, some of the first paintings that I showed at the Matney Gallery were architecture with people interacting with that architecture. Other pieces that I've shown were imagining figures in the space historically. And so that's been something I've been thinking about, but also, as an educator, I teach landscape painting, and that is an open-air class. Plein plan air is the traditional word for it, but I don't necessarily think of it as plein air. I don't think of myself as connected to a particular lineage. I think of it much more as experiential painting and work that's in conversation with all the paintings I do. But there's really something special about being at a place for a finite amount of time and trying to end with a painting that says something about that experience.
John Lee Matney: So you did several during your trip. Did you work on other ideas as well?
Teddy Johnson: I did one every day. So I did one painting on site every day. And then I did two other works that I think happened at night but I painted mostly during the daylight hours, I was really invested in taking advantage of the experience of being there and doing something I couldn't do anywhere else. And then, at night, it was really about trying to bring together the ideas that were coming to me while I was on-site. Because doing a residency is, for me, a form of research. I want something that's gonna feed into my thoughts for the whole year so it was a chance to say, here I am in this space, having a reaction to the space.
I studied twice in Italy previously. It was also a way for me to reconnect with what were the things that were foundational in my understanding of who I am as an artist when I was here as a studentt. So I came back and, for this concise amount of time, it was a chance to process what are the things that are influential in my work here? There are also two small pieces that I finished while I was there that was more about constructive painting, Something from my mind's eye that utilizes the space around me. . And I intend to go back this summer.