Abstraction of Space
Drawing on a career designing large-scale public spaces, William Johnson creates paintings and sculptures that abstract the built environment into compositions of space, form, and color.
His work distills architectural narratives to their essence, inviting viewers to experience familiar environments in new ways.
Collections
Paintings
Hand-painted paper, Japanese sumi ink, and acrylic paint are layered into abstract collages and mounted to canvas with rabbit skin glue.
Geometric forms and strong organizing lines compose the images and often suggest buildings, landscapes and horizons. The use of figure/ground relationships between dark and light color fields challenge the viewer to perceive depth, scale and proportion, thus drawing one into an abstracted environment.
Architecture
Modern architecture reimagined as two-dimensional compositions of acrylic, paper and Japanese sumo ink
Textiles
This body of work explores texture, transparency, and depth through layered assemblages of handmade papers, vellum, printed materials, and reclaimed fragments. The resulting compositions create shifting relationships between light and shadow that change with the viewer’s perspective and the passage of time.