Lucas Johnson
(1940 - 2002)
Lucas Johnson was born in Connecticut, grew up in California, and over the years, lived in New Orleans, New York, New Mexico, Mexico City and Houston. For a brief time, he was enrolled at the University of California studying marine biology, but dropped out to travel the world and pursue his interest in art. Johnson is a self-taught artist who took no formal art classes yet became a major force in the Texas art scene in the 60s and 70s. He worked in a variety of media including egg tempera, pen and ink, oil, acrylic and almost every form of printmaking.
Johnson’s art matured during his time in Mexico. He traveled to Mexico City in 1962 on a week’s vacation and found himself so enamored with the country, he stayed. He immersed himself in the politics, music, art and fishing culture. During his 10 years there, he worked and exhibited alongside the leading Mexican artists of the day such as Jose Luis Cuevas and Leonora Carrington. He married Mexico City native and art historian Patricia Covo in 1971.
Johnson’s subject matter ranges from landscapes to haunting self-portraits to strange, imagined aquatic life. His colorful landscapes are frequently filled with stacked volcanic mounds leaking trails of red lava. Johnson’s work is occasionally referred to as “imagist,” which is similar to surrealism, but actually a term for the early 20th century poetic style of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
Johnson moved to Houston in 1973 when the pollution in Mexico City became unbearable. He exhibited in a gallery owned by his wife and with Moody Gallery. His work was shown extensively throughout Texas and Mexico and may be found in the permanent collections of the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont; the Menil Collection in Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Brooklyn Museum, NY.
Art on Campus
Presa
Year: 1993
Medium: Acrylic with Oil glaze on Canvas
Location: Geology Building, 1st floor
Gift of Rob Clark and Jerry Thacker
Presa, which is Spanish for dam, is an image of two massive mountain peaks, brown and rust in tone with a white geometric shape wedged between them. In the foreground, at either edge of the canvas, two salmon-colored barricades protrude inward. The softly painted surface of the pink shapes contrasts with the roughly painted earthy hillsides. The detail in the terrain is subtle with tiny boulders, areas of fossilization and fissures leaking red lava. The artist’s visible brush strokes and flecks of bright color add to the sense of texture and keep the eye moving around the powerful canvas.
Johnson created a sense of depth with overlapping shapes that exude mass and weight yet chose not to use traditional perspective. He preferred the flat style of painting practiced by Contemporary Mexican artists. The influence of Mexican myths and legends is also evident in Johnson’s work. He believed everything on the earth is sacred and has a sense of life, including the rocks that make up the mountains. He illustrates this through the tiny boulders that appear to be in motion in this painting.
The two peaks are likely meant to represent the twin volcanoes visible from Mexico City, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl. Johnson painted dozens of images of volcanoes and frequently included a colorful barrier of some type around them. He was an admirer of Luis Barragan, Mexico’s celebrated modern architect known for integrating colorful walls into courtyards and gardens. Johnson may be paying tribute to Barragan with these geometric structures, or they could be interpreted as the titular dam holding back the encroaching volcanoes. One of Johnson’s favorite subjects was Paricutin that erupted suddenly in 1943 in the cornfield of a local farmer and grew to a height of 1,391 feet burying two towns in lava.