Will Johnstone, Writer & Artist, West Highlands, Denver, Colorado
At the age of fourteen I began painting southwestern landscapes under Fanchon Heath Burtenshaw of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Greatly influenced by my environment, my paintings are now most frequently abstractions, evolving quickly after relocation to the much denser and more metropolitan Denver, Colorado, and by annual summer retreats to the central coast of Maine, a few feet above high tide in a tiny, hidden cove, where the water is always dynamic -- a hypnotically intriguing opposition to the more static southwestern mountains, deserts, and plains.
I moved from New Mexico to Denver in 1994. I spent a lot of time exploring downtown Denver, a wonderfully compact and knowable city center. This was years before the Denver Art Museum had contracted Daniel Libeskind to design the Fredrick Hamilton Building expansion. I painted "Celebrating Denver" that first fall, and called it then "First Impressions of Denver". I exploded a hyperbolic parabola into the sky, extended cubic crystalline buildings at an angle into the blue, and thrust a spire up where I thought there ought to be one. Today, it seems this might all have been just a little bit of a glimpse of the future. Now, the Extension to the Denver Art Museum negotiates the sky, the Denver Convention Center thrusts its angular roof toward Speer Blvd., and the Denver Millennium Footbridge punctuates the Denver skyline. Isn't that what I painted in 1994?
Artist's Statement: Increasingly, my paintings reflect the way I think about the world. They are visual representations of a symbolic language at the root of my thoughts. It is a language without words, segmenting the universe into overlapping relationships where cloud-like ideas and filaments of thought leak across boundaries.
Writer's Statement: My writing grows out of my love for the natural world, my life experiences, and my deep belief in the almost unlimited natural abilities and goodness that can come to fruition from the youngest child when given opportunity, encouragement, and chance.