Acrylic on canvas - Unframed

Clay Johnson is an American abstract painter whose reductivist compositions explore the relationships between color, form, and texture. He lives and works in Laramie, Wyoming.

The technique Johnson employs is extremely rigorous, involving, as he says, “pushing paint around with palette knives and drywall tools rather than brushes.”
The scraping and sanding creates a variety of different textures and leads to the emergence of unexpected forms.

Rather than being planned ahead of time, the work emerges through a series of critical responses to previous decisions. He begins each painting by taping off one or more horizon lines. His initial color choice then guides the composition forward. Certain elements—a color, a line, a texture—are destroyed, while other elements incite unimagined discoveries.