Wreckage and Rescue: The Art of Bradford Johnson

Joel Sheesley

and when he knew for certain
only drowning men could see him
he said, all men will be sailors then
until the sea shall free them
—Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne”

IN Ascending Fisher, a 1996 painting by Bradford Johnson, the blurred
silhouette of a helicopter hovers at the top of the picture [see Plate 5].
Suspended from the helicopter is a lifeline on which hangs a blurred bundle. Rocking away from this vertical line is another dark silhouette, a large trawler listing to the right. The sea is not wild, but it is plain that this ship is in trouble. It is also clear that a rescue of some sort is underway. But it is taking time; the copter hovers in the sky while the bundle is either being lowered or raised. Minutes tick away.

Time is also slipping past as we look at this painting by Bradford Johnson. The layering of glossy polyurethane varnish and oil paint is built up into an impasto surface, each layer composed of minutely shifting visions of the wreck/rescue. The paint invites prolonged scanning, a searching among the soft edges of things in expectation that something missed earlier will surface. It takes time to look, and while we are doing that looking, a ship is going down.

This metaphor, of the maritime rescue or shipwreck, has been the focus of exploration in Johnson’s work for over three years. How the metaphor developed to its present form is a question that brings us into a discussion of Johnson’s artistic and personal sensibilities. It is a story of the productive interchange between an individual artistic impulse and an art world hunkered in the mass of politics, technology, theory, and fashion that comprises contemporary culture. In this story, persistent seeking and artistic exploration lead to the discovery of a means by which to artistically express a vision consonant with this artist’s Christian faith. The result is an unlikely artistic descant, a melody floating sometimes far above the turmoil of culture and its many conflicts. Yet Johnson’s work is born out of the meeting of the personal and cultural worlds. That Bradford’s mature imagery explores the theme of “rescue at sea” is perhaps itself the most telling feature of that experience.

As a child, Johnson’s imagination was stirred by family summer trips to Cape Cod. An avid beachcomber, Johnson relished in sifting through the treasures the ocean deposited on the shore. Long, quiet hours spent searching through, and carefully examining, this detritus/booty inspired in Johnson great curiosity about the details of nature. At the same time, the shift of perspectives from the intimate details of each day’s collection to the sublime grandeur of the whole expanse of shore, ocean, and sky created a sense of mystery and a longing to respond poetically to this natural drama.

Perhaps under the influence of his older sisters, these trips set a pattern of response in Johnson to the ocean. In his childhood, Johnson’s sisters—one of whom went on to work in theater, while the other became a medical doctor—set before him models of both artistic and scientific responses to the world. Between these alternating approaches to the magnificence of the ocean, Johnson chose the scientific, and imagined his future in marine biology. Nonetheless, his natural talent and instinct for art showed itself throughout his early schooling. His high school art teachers encouraged him to study art after graduating, but he continued to set his sights on the scientific realm. He applied to Rhode Island School of Design after high school, but it was not his first choice of colleges. Again, Johnson looked to the example of his sisters, one of whom had attended Wheaton College. His upbringing had been in a demonstrably Christian household, and an education grounded in Christian faith appealed both to a sense of family tradition and to Johnson’s own intellectual desire to ask questions of the faith that he had inherited and that had served him so well as a young person.

Sometimes the mathematician must also become an artist. So it was with Piero della Fransesca, during the Italian Renaissance. Sometimes, as in the case of the nineteenth-century American artist Thomas Eakins, the artist is also a practical scientist. But ultimately, in the case of Bradford Johnson, the dominance of science in the mixed pattern of scientific and artistic responses to the world turned out to be a somewhat romantic affair. That is to say, Johnson’s scientific aspirations proved his curiosity about nature, but practicing the disciplined grind of scientific analysis in high school did not come easily to him; it began to seem a strained and distant response to the allure of nature, the vital subject. Due to a less-than-stellar academic record, Johnson was refused admission to Wheaton College. He entered Rhode Island School of Design in the field of illustration and spent his first and only year there somewhat frustrated that his plans had fallen out differently than he had imagined.

At R.I.S.D. Johnson sharpened his fundamental skills in drawing and design, but he never really felt comfortable there. He decided to take the next year off and, during that hiatus from school, determined to make another run at Wheaton College and what he considered its academically demanding program. He applied to Wheaton again and this time was accepted. His order of study priorities at Wheaton was academics, then theater, and finally art, but by the end of his first semester, art had taken over first place and the pattern was reversed again.

Both the art and theater programs at Wheaton proved productive for Johnson. The sense of community he found in the theater was encouraging, and the artistic insight of the college’s theater director Jim Young—that art arises out of an internal struggle—helped push Johnson’s understanding of the arts to a new and higher level. In the art department, he was introduced to the work of Robert Rauschenberg, and with that discovery, Johnson discarded his old vision of becoming an illustrator. Rauschenberg’s habit of drawing attention to the poetic possibilities of the simple stuff of everyday life fascinated Johnson. Through the technique of “assemblage,” Rauschenberg brought together an assortment of otherwise ordinary or even junk-like objects and organized them into combined forms that resonated with a new sense of poetry. So assembled, the objects themselves acquired a poignancy that far outstripped what they would accomplish in conventional forms of illustration.

Johnson’s artistic impulse was to approach the world in a manner similar to that of the nineteenth-century poet, Charles Baudelaire. When Baudelaire confronted the storehouse of signs and everyday subject matter—the stuff of the world—he concluded that the artist is the ultimate meaning-maker, finally giving these signs or subject matters significance through artistic creation. Johnson, however, working from the belief that the world is God’s creation, recognized inherent meanings already at work in the stuff of the world. The artist’s challenge was to engage these signs and subjects, and their meanings, in artistic conversation.

From this flowed a series of student artworks that combined drawing, painting, photocopying, and casting, along with the use of any number of “found-objects.” Of particular interest to Johnson were photographs of industrial construction sites, which he would photocopy, mount on panels, paint over, and attach to them cast fragments of the human body and discarded hand tools.

Culminating his study at Wheaton College, Johnson also exhibited several large pieces for which he chose gypsum wallboard as a support. This material gave itself easily to shallow relief carving. After priming, the multi-leveled surface could then be painted. Common to all this student work were complicated surfaces composed of many layers, laced with metaphors drawn from the body, the landscape, and the tools of the building trades [see Plate 6].

The subject matter of these works had nothing to do with the ocean and ships, but the process of making the work depended very much on the habit of scavenging on the beach. All of this work was dependent on “found” materials. Johnson’s choice of subject matter—construction sites and broken hand tools, for example—already explored the idea of the man-made monument set in the natural world, a romantic vision that would be developed later in the distressed ship on the high seas. These works were literally thick: they were inlayed with carvings and paint, as well as photocopies and other collage elements. This sense of layering and building would be pursued later with photocopies, polyurethane varnish, and oil paint.

After graduating from college, Johnson traveled with friends to Central America, and upon returning to the United States, settled with these friends in Dallas. This proved to be a misadventure. Johnson identified with neither the cuture nor the climate of Central America or of Dallas; all in all, it convinced him that his heart was in New England. He moved to Boston and for three years found jobs working for the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the Arts Fellowship, and various art galleries. During this time, Johnson continued painting over photocopies of construction sites, and rediscovered another subject, the Loch Ness monster, which had been a fascination from his youth. As the quantity and quality of his work grew, he recognized that he needed an organized framework of critique if his work was to advance further, and so he applied for admission to the M.F.A. program at Hunter College, in New York City.

He began his work at Hunter in 1991 and immediately found the college’s atmosphere to be dominated by two aesthetic approaches about which he was naturally skeptical: theoretical discourse and conceptual art. Nonetheless, both of these approaches, each in its own way, helped him to refine his artistic methodology.

Within art schools, the decade of the eighties saw a dramatic rise in, and pre-eminence given to, theoretical discussion largely concerned with the deconstruction of traditional notions about artworks, artists, and how both are received by society. Many students felt that it was imperative to predicate their interest in making art on an engagement with some aspect of a wide ranging theoretical discourse—a discourse that included social, psychological, and political, as well as aesthetic foundations. Indeed, to fail to do so seemed a failure to create an art capable of contending with contemporary reality. Such a spirit was present at Hunter College, and though some professors offered a moderating influence, the spirit of theory in critiques and seminars was inescapable.

In an effort to place his creative efforts within the bounds of some form of critical discourse, Johnson became interested in documentation. He began to regard the photocopies, so prevalent in his work, as traces of a process of documentation, a documentation which he, by photocopying photographic reproductions, dulled and degraded. In an ironic way, his copies of copies both preserved and reverenced the original documents, while, at the same time, as the images became increasingly grainy and blurred, they destroyed the accuracy and sharpness that documentation traditionally strives for. As a document, the image was tied to real time and space, but, once it was reduced to vaguer form through multiple copying, it began to develop another sort of identity. The photocopied image became so indistinct that it began to resemble a memory or a dream image rather than the indexical imprint of light and shadow recorded on a piece of film. Its putative objectivity was undermined. When he would then paint over this residual fragment of documentation, it was further translated into the expressive realm that traditional documentation intends to avoid. Thus Johnson began to understand his own process as one that involves a critique and transformation of traditional ideas about the meaning of documentation.

Of course, Johnson’s initial attraction to, and use of, photocopies had come with no such rationalization. He simply used photocopies because they appealed to his aesthetic instincts. The rationalizing process he engaged in at Hunter, however, was useful for giving direction to his instincts; it helped him become more conscious of what he was looking for in photographs and photocopies. His scavenger’s eye was sharpened to look for material that easily lent itself to transformation, a transformation that, through the process of photocopying, would leave only a lingering but important trace of documentation.

Likewise, Johnson’s engagement with professors who practiced abstract and conceptually-based art had a positive affect on his own representational art. In critique sessions, Johnson felt constrained to defend his work on a theoretical basis. He found himself choosing images whose precise identity was somewhat indistinct. He also began to crop his photographic sources in ways that emphasized the abstract arrangement of forms more so than a direct focus on the subject matter presented. He began to experiment with oblong rectangular formats for his paintings. These long, narrow rectangles offered an offbeat and surprising presentation space, which, as an abstract element, became just as important as the subject matter represented within them.

Placing an emphasis on the theoretical issues of painting helped Johnson to achieve a sense of distance from the subject matter he represented in his work. The paintings had to succeed first and foremost as intriguing, abstract constructions. He was thus able to allow the subject matter to have a life of its own; Johnson focused his attention on the formal problems of painting, and the subject matter told its own story. This air of objectivity, or distancing, toward his subject matter proved crucial when, at Hunter, he took up in a concerted and serious way the representation of a subject matter filled with subjective and emotional connotations, a subject matter that returned him to his interests in the water and the things that dwell therin. Bradford began to paint a long series of works dealing with the Loch Ness monster.

In 1993 Hunter College awarded Johnson a travel grant, which enabled him to travel to Loch Ness, in Scotland, to explore and observe the people and environs from which the story of the Loch Ness monster has arisen. He was able to feel the texture, taste the air, and observe the ambiance of light and landscape that are the concrete framework from within which the Loch Ness mystery has emerged. Johnson’s paintings of Loch Ness and its monster constitute an exploration of the relationship between the landscape and the documentary evidence of the watery mystery some have beheld there. Of more than fifty paintings that he made about Loch Ness, none of them attempts to organize or test the evidence of the monster’s existence. Rather, working from reproductions of photographs of the monster, and from his own photographs and memories of the lake, he re-presents that evidence.

Some of the paintings feature a dark, long-necked form rising from the water, an image that has become the symbol of the monster itself [see back cover]. Others are more subtle and deal with the landscape of the lake and its atmosphere. One work presents a long, narrow view of the water in which we see a series of concentric wavelets radiating from a central point. All of the paintings are monochromatic, and, through painterly build-up of subtle grays, the works create a peculiar sensation of light. In some of the paintings there is, beneath the paint, a detectable photocopy reproduction of the lake and monster, which has been glued to the painting support and painted over, but which is still partly visible.

When viewing a group of these paintings together, the light and tone of the place first enchant us. Secondly, we are aware of the monster, the enigma Loch Ness has produced. Finally, we begin to reflect on the content of the works. In Johnson’s paintings, the combination of the lake and documents of the monster story is a reflection on the interaction of place, personal testimony, documentary evidence, faith, and art. While reports and sightings of the Loch Ness monster differ in significant ways from Christian testimony, stories of the elusive creature do in some ways parallel the function and character of Christian testimony. So much of our faith in a Christian’s testimony of her experience with God depends upon our trust in the teller of the story. We believe in a being we have never seen, but rely on the accounts of others and seek to perceive His presence in effects we notice in the world around us. This, of course, is the heart of the content of the Loch Ness paintings, but it comes to us slowly, and perhaps we are somewhat resentful of the fact that these issues have been raised though the use of a tabloid hoax. Johnson himself was reticent about this content and preferred to talk somewhat disinterestedly about the pictures “Hunter-style,” as formal constructions based on the peculiar qualities of a photocopied document.

Nonetheless, an incipient awareness of the impact of his own personal experience at Loch Ness was taking shape. In order to enlarge upon the meaning of these paintings, Johnson began reflecting on his own experiences in the water. To see from below or at the surface level of water, to dip an oar or paddle into water and stare at the ripples it generates, is to confront a mirage-like world of wavy illusion. To bear witness to that world is to testify to the sight of a watery truth—a truth that resists easy classification. Johnson may have sensed an intriguing resonance between two traditions of testimony—those who claim to have sighted the Loch Ness monster and Christians who have striven to describe what are essentially elusive religious experiences.

Water memories of his own, from days of sailing with his dad, began to appear in Johnson’s paintings. Thus he became more concerned with an explicit rendering of what he calls an “interior sensibility” than with adapting that sensibility to current postmodern theory and fashion. With this change in orientation, from a desire to make art that coheres with the relevance of a line of discourse toward a desire to create art that symbolizes personal encounter and experience, Johnson found himself investigating a new set of artistic models. The paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, which represent a distinctly personal vision of the ocean and which engage the notion of the sublime, became an important touchstone for Johnson. His interest in Ryder led him to Marsden Hartley and Mark Rothko, each of whom referred to the sublime element in Ryder’s work. Johnson read Robert Rosenbloom’s Modern Painting in the Northern Romantic Tradition, in which the sublime is discussed as an aspect of a romantic interpretation of modern art. This existential and personal view of the artistic experience stands in sharp contrast to what has become the postmodern fashion, which presents artistic activity as a phenomenon shaped by the artist’s location in an impersonal web of theoretical discourse.

Johnson finished the M.F.A. program at Hunter in the spring of 1994. His thesis exhibition featured, alongside the Loch Ness paintings, a number of works that reflected his more personal experiences with water itself. Also included were paintings that depicted shipwrecks at sea. These shipwreck works drew special notice from his professors, who complimented the magnetic power of the metaphor and his assured handling of the painted surfaces. Though the metaphor of a ship lost at sea could have easily lent itself to a deconstructionist interpretation, his professors did not engage the work in that way. Instead, they noted a heartfelt sincerity in the work and encouraged him to pursue his own sensibility further. For Johnson, this critique amounted to a kind of blessing on the mode of artistic expression that he had always sought, but had been taught to question: the expression of personal convictions and feelings through metaphoric means.

Increasingly, the image of the sinking ship/rescue became the dominant metaphor in Johnson’s paintings. He moved to Washington Heights in Manhattan and spent the next four years living in one room of a two-bedroom apartment and painting in the other. A part-time job with the New York Public Library covered living expenses, and, accepting a somewhat monk-like existence, the problems of painting occupied the rest of Johnson’s time and income. This is not to say, however, that he worked in total isolation. In 1995, Johnson spent five weeks painting at the MacDowell Colony, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and in 1996 and 1998, he worked at Yaddo, in Saratoga, NY.

This concentrated effort enabled Johnson to refine the shipwreck/rescue metaphor. He continued to develop the technique of mixing polyurethane varnish with oil paint to produce multi-layered impasto paintings in which line is non-existent and forms are defined by luminous, feathery edges. These are the paintings that Johnson now exhibits at the Kougeas Gallery in East Boston.

The paintings are monochrome, often sepia brown in color, but sometimes cool gray into black. At times they evoke the sea rescue paintings of Winslow Homer, particularly when they feature figures struggling over the sea on a lifeline. But the nineteenth-century Homer had an eye on the heroic gesture in all of this; he shows us a drama in which the stalwart rescue the weak. Johnson’s pictures show us something that is much more tentative and therefore more dangerous. In Lee Shore [see Plate 7], or The Breeches, blurred forms of human figures hang on taut lines stretched over shifting seas, but these vague silhouettes collide and interact with other, equally blurred, human figures in the foreground who balance precariously on rocks or decks. There is a feeling of helplessness as the mighty ships are going down, and the risky off-loading of human cargo is anything but certain.

In all of these works, one senses not the roar of the storm or the shouts of victims and rescuers, but rather, an uncanny silence. The texture and color of the paintings seem to absorb sound. As one’s cry for help is often stifled in a dream, the thick impasto layering of paint seems to soak up and mute anything audible that might otherwise emanate from the scene. At most, we sense the possibility of hearing the ocean as it is heard when we put our ear to a conch shell; the roar is reduced to less than a low distant stirring. And it is in this silence that these great hulks of human engineering are sinking while human beings are attempting to intervene.

The quiet tension produced is most palpable in Awash [see Plate 8]. Dominating the right side of this long, narrow, rectangular picture is an ocean swell that will soon sweep over the ship located in the frame’s lower left corner. The waters are not raging, but, for some reason, the ship is already lying low in the water. We can sense that, while the ship may weather this wave, it will soon succumb to the sea’s strength, and vanish.

In Aloft, another rescue involving a helicopter, a ship is sinking in heavy seas. A helicopter beneath a churning sky hovers over a ship that appears to be rapidly breaking up. Here, we become immediately aware of a factor inherent in this whole series of paintings: the human effort to intervene in the tragedy must be staged from an insubstantial base. In a world of water and air, there is nothing solid upon which the rescue effort can be leveraged.

This insight, of course, is part and parcel of contemporary postmodern thinking about the world. Where all meanings are socially constructed, none can claim more than temporary authority, nor do any offer the stable foundation once ascribed to religious belief and then later to an optimistic scientism. Today, our primary task is to decode stable authoritative metaphors and liberate ourselves from the tyranny of their power. The result is a picture of shifting seas and tenuous efforts, on the part of some, to hold on to something.

Is this what Bradford Johnson is painting about? He has certainly been educated toward such a project, and I imagine he would consider such a reading of his work an intriguing possibility. But the other side of the shipwreck is the rescue.

In depicting an almost inevitable or despairing shipwreck, the very process of representation has implied the presence of a witness, an observer who may attempt a rescue. The act of representation then presumes a potential saving presence. Further, representation guarantees that even an impending loss is not in vain. The anguish of the sinking ship does not go unnoticed; through representation, it has touched our consciousness and therefore transforms our world. Johnson’s images thus evoke a sense of paradox that engages the world at a much deeper level than that of most postmodern deconstructionists.

This paradox establishes a third point between sinking ship and floating helicopter or rescue boat. The third point is faith, a belief that our calamities on the high seas are seen. We do not struggle in a void but are beheld and accounted for. Thus, our lives are given meaning and substance. An elusive commodity itself, faith also has been described as a substance—the ground, perhaps, from which true rescue is leveraged.

We are always being made aware that this substance exists within a world of ephemeral, shifting, seemingly insubstantial circumstances. It is in these watery circumstances that we navigate the courses of our individual lives and in which our communities and their institutions attempt to lay foundations for the future. It is in these circumstances that such foundations crumble and in which individual lives are lost. The shipwreck is an apt metaphor for such calamity. Bradford Johnson’s graduate education made him fully aware of how contemporary art can embody this reality. But it is through Johnson’s own insight, care, and handling of this metaphor that its paradoxical dimension comes to the fore: how loss may point to life, and how wreckage can turn to rescue.

Visit Joel Sheesley as Image Artist of the Month for August '05

Issue #25 • Winter '99/'00