Los Angeles-based painter Dion Johnson makes dynamic hard-edged works. Geometric forms mutate intuitively with graphic contrasting colors into delicately balanced compositions.

An artist statement from Dion from a 2015 exhibition below:

DION JOHNSON ARTIST STATEMENT

I draw inspiration from how I experience my environment – through small doses of visual splendor and sensation in my day-to-day routine. Observing shadows stretching across my living room floor, watching the curvature of the freeway interchange while driving to my studio, and seeing the Southern California light filtering through urban structures.

When viewing my recent work a full range of associations and perceptual cues percolate amid the interlocked and overlapped shapes and forms. Intuitive color selections position a cool, gravel gray next to a sticky sweet lime, while a velvety plum descends down the painting’s edge to slowly eclipse a electric yellow racing stripe.

A large open red shape with a concave edge alludes to a broad spatial shift like when a bright noon day light opens up a clouded sky and to a personal sensory reception like when a memory charged synapse triggers a to pupil dilate. Lively chromatic layering blossoms out of the periphery, and energy pulses across the picture plane. Stripe formations drift, squeeze and dissolve as stable moments of architectural structure transition into fluid glowing atmospheres.

My influences range from the color harmony and agitation of Milton Avery’s seascapes, to the geometric gestures and open spaces of Ellsworth Kelly to the bending and seguing forms found in Eero Saarinen’s architecture.  

Dion Johnson 2015