George Johanson – painter, printmaker, and teacher – was born in Seattle, studied art in Portland, Oregon, and lived in New York in the early 1950s before returning to Portland. Whether in New York jazz clubs and slaughterhouses, in Mexican villages, at the Rose Festival held each year in Portland, at rehearsals of the Oregon Symphony, or in life drawing sessions with artist friends, making images on paper has been a basic element for Johanson throughout his life. The haunting power of Johanson’s art originates, almost always, in drawing.
Johanson’s art is concerned with memory and recollection, dream and fantasy, biography and autobiography, physical and imaginative detachment yet sensual engagement. He is also the painter of fires that break out in city buildings or spew from volcanoes, and he often sets fire’s rampage alongside human lassitude and seeming indifference.