And in Other News . . .

See Our Artists Around the Region

The talent of Georgetown artists, including Ed Bear Miller, will be on view at The House of Sweden from Thursday, February 16 - Tuesday, February 20.  The opening reception will be Thursday, February 16 from 6-9 pm.  The House of Sweden is located at 2900 K Street, NW, Washington, DC. Show hours are 11 am - 5 pm.  For more info, visit www.houseofsweden.com.

Ed Bear Miller also will have a one-man show at the Dumbarton Church from February 25 - March 2 in conjunction with the Dumbarton Concert Series.  Dumbarton Church is located at 3133 Dumbarton Street, NW, Washington, DC.

Also, from March 3 - March 31, Ed Bear Miller will have a solo show at Octavia Art Gallery in New Orleans, LA.  For further information, please visit www.octaviaartgallery.com.

Martin Slater has a drawing selected to be in the 15th Annual National Juried Show at Gallery West, 1213 King Street, Alexandria, VA.  The show is open February 8 - March 4.  For more information, call 703-549-6006 or visit www.gallery-west.com.

Judy Gilbert Levey is showing her landscapes in a show called Scenes and Ceramics at Gallery Har Shalom from December 30 - February 27.  The gallery is located at Congegation Har Shalom, 11510 Falls Road, Potomac, MD.  For more information, visit www.harshalom.org or call 301-299-7087.

Katherine Blakeslee will have a solo exhibition of her watercolors from March 1 - 31 at the Bethesda Library, 7400 Arlington Road, Bethesda, MD.  For hours and other information, please call 240-777-0970.

Patricia Zannie will be teaching two courses in the Spring 2012 session of the School of Art & Design at Montgomery College.  The Monday class is titled "Zen of Design" and the Wednesday class is "The Rebel Masters That Changed Modern Art."  For more informaiton and to register, please visit www.montgomerycolleg.edu/schoolofartanddesign.  Note that seniors are exempt from tuition.

Be sure to read the Washington Examiner coverage of the current show at the Foundry.

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Get To Know the Artists

Wayne Johnson

The Mark
As an "artist-technician," Wayne Johnson has tried to combine aspects of three different modes:  Intaglio printing, photograpy, and pen & ink graphics.  The drawing technique itself draws heavily upon the work of the Pointillists and Gestalt psychology.  As an artist-imagist, Wayne is aligned with the aestethic camps of Surrealism and Magic Realism.  Being partially color-blind, he primarily works in black and white images, whether via a press, a photographic print or a drawing and, in all cases, he likes to create images with some visual "half life" through object to surface texture ambiguity and distorted iconography.  His goal is always to achieve some measure of continuity.

Where the rubber hits the road is the smallest incremental intrusion that a black dot can make on white paper.  He calls this the "mark."  In printmaking, the ink that defines the object is confined to the holes, dots, gouges, strikes or tones have been been placed by hand either through the ground or directly on the plate.  So in the pen & ink drawings and the prints, lines are actually comprised of many dots placed closely together.  Ther representation of a surface texture . . . or the surface itself . . . is comprised of hundreds of thoursands of these very small dots/marks.  In film, this was "grain."  Digitally, we talk of pixels (image) or dpi (printing).  (See image above -- detail of Callisto. The original is 8" x 10".)

In "real life," objects exist in three dimensions and are recognized by their shape, surface texture, color, and position or gestalt.  In Wayne's black and white world, objects have "colors" by virtue of their recognizable and contextually relevant tonal values.  For Wayne, making these distinctions is what makes black and white ink drawings so much fun.

Some years ago, he found that dots and lines could be combined to create or indicate various types of lines and from that, various surface indications.  He worked for awhile using various linked dots to form lines, combining dots and dashes, almost like Morse code.  He also worked with the effects of white dots on glack fields and various combinaitons of white spaces, interlinked lines, dots and shapes.  In his "minimalist" drawings, there are white "lines" created by a surrounding field of very small dots, lines formed not by something, but by its abasence.  (See image at left -- detail of Morse No. 2.  The original is 10" x 12".)

His objective is to make images and spaces/things look real . . . or almost real, and to include enough reality in objexts, surfaces, textures, shapes, oconography, that the overall impact or effect cannot be taken in all at once, but only over time.  It is a discovery process that he likes to think is akin to a language, each drawing or print having its own story to tell.