Journey Through an Artist's Mind,
    extractions from an artist's journal, by Will Johnstone.

2005: Have you ever wondered, "What was the artist thinking?"

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.

When I reduce my paintings to the lines that compose them, there is a cryptic alphabet of ideograms that comes from very deep within. It would be difficult for me to make words out of that alphabet, so I make paintings.

April 28, 2005 8:59AM    Sometimes small increments more completely define relationships than do large masses of similarity and differences. The upper block of burnt sienna needs to shade more deeply where the edge appears to go behind the lower, larger block of the same color. The block of yellow oxide left of that and below the continuation of the partition needs to be substantially lightened. The triangle above needs shading.

Thinking on this, it occurs to me again that visual arts are not necessarily thought out in words: they are thought in images and intuitive image changes, visualized, not spoken in the mind. The eyes move to the parts of the painting being considered, focusing there, but at the same time taking in the whole of the painting and the intricacies of all of the relationships.

How can this be expressed in words? How can a picture that is an interrelationship of lines and shapes, shades and strokes, forms and colors be described in words? How can the experience of the painting be transferred to someone who is not seeing the painting and has not seen the process of its creation.

I am overwhelmed by the abyss between individuals, languages, and minds.

How does one explain the pit that opens in the stomach and abdomen of the painter, and the shaking with anticipation and excitement and fear, and the focus of the mind and the body and the soul into the moment of the painting? Is this how a God feels at creation, humbled and alone, afraid that skill will not be enough, imagining the next stroke only when the stroke before has just been finished? (Words are sometimes like that, but words are a different medium.) -10:20

3:20- With such a pit in my stomach it is often difficult to continue to move ahead. There is no one saying I must paint. Nor is anyone printing a paycheck for my paintings on Friday. Labors of love are easily interrupted by labors for payment and labors of obligation. My paintings continue only because I choose to continue to move them toward completion.

White, burnt sienna, dioxazine purple: I darken the triangle above the lower left center vertical rectangle of varied yellow oxide, clean the pallet knives off onto a 9 x 12 canvas board, and strip the tape. It is getting there, this allusion to something structural. I touch up two very tiny single dots. Maybe you would never notice, but they bother me. Ah yes. I hang it on the fermenting wall. No, what is that, a smudge mark? There is one big blob of wrong color. I pull it back to the painting table and knife in an over-layer and then, with a very tiny brush, touch along a critical edge, lightening the thin, slightly too dark edge shading, then place the canvas back onto the fermenting wall.

It is graining outside, frozen grains of misty, icy rain. It is the end of April in Denver. It will not get above 37 tomorrow. The cold seeps into my basement studio.

Looking at the painting now fermenting on the studio wall adjacent to the wine cellar door, waiting for a highlight or a shadow to insinuate itself, or demand itself, I can imagine someone asking if I have been influenced lately by Libeskind, whose art museum addition daily becomes more defined in the 21st century downtown Denver sky, an interplay of architectural angles and forms, perhaps along somewhat similar lines to the painting on the wall. I would answer that Libeskind, and I, and others, seem to have been influenced by something that has been going on in all of our lives, our individual worlds, something like the shattering of our personal mirrors around us, dreaming each of our own Fortress of Solitude we experience instead the transaction of our experiences, each individually, events and circumstances over which we have had no control, and mostly, no input. When we create, we encapsulate this; we freeze it, hoping perhaps that in so doing we have gained some control. WJ