Emily Johnston paints what the earth remember
By Irish Cushing
Photography by Lawrence Braun
Life moves in seasons, and that measure shifts our sense of cause and consequence. Emily works within this long view. She lifts pigment from stone born eons ago and grinds it with river water. She calls the practice integrity of intuition; through it, art binds to land and to time. Color on the canvas becomes a record of fossil and tide, joining medium with maker, place with era.
Walking up the steps of the old Victorian house in Bovina Center, where Emily Johnston’s studio is located, I hear the subtle rush of the Little Delaware River behind me and feel the presence of the old, maple-and-hemlock-covered mountains to the north and south. The vibrance of this place follows me into the studio, where Emily Johnston greets me with a hug and a grin; there’s a wise quietude in her gaze as she moves around her studio, its table laid with marble and granite mortar-and pestles, handmade natural-pigment pastels, and jars of oak gall ink.
The artist has just returned from Rome. There, she spent a week transforming stones, dirt, and minerals into pigments, using methods humans have practiced for thousands of years. On the table, I notice a palette carved from found Italian cypress wood, each of its wells filled with a different delicate tone. Beside that, there’s a series of pens and brushes made from swan and goose feathers. Johnston shows me a notebook filled with daily drawings done with these pigments, some abstract and some depicting landscapes. I look up from the table and let my eyes rest on the walls, hung with Johnston’s newest body of paintings: shapes that are alive with warmth and strangeness dance over raw canvas and sheets of hemp paper. Then my eyes move to the window, to the mountains and sky, the sound of the river, and the continuity becomes clear.
“When I moved upstate, I wanted to make work with my body and be creating in relationship with natural elements,” says Johnston, who moved to the Western Catskills from New York City in 2015. “In hindsight, I can see that I was looking for a way to make work with the actual earth, not just about nature or the landscape.”
Johnston’s arrival at pigment-making feels like a homecoming of sorts. Although she’s American, Johnston grew up in Paris, moving to the outskirts of Chicago for college. Her career as an artist began with large-format photography; she worked for years in both film and digital mediums, showing her work in New York’s East Village and various artist spaces upstate. She’s traveled through Mexico, Nicaragua, California, and the Pacific Northwest, observing the earth’s patterns along the way.
“When I moved upstate, I wanted to make work with my body and be creating in relationship with natural elements.”
The network of processes and ideas she encountered through photography led her transition into working in collage and, from there, into drawing and mixed media. (I was lucky enough to view Johnston’s inaugural exhibition of drawings, Returning–pieces full of motion, gesture, and organic mystery–last year in Delhi, New York.) On a trip to New Mexico earlier this year, Johnston decided to try out mixing her own pigment from the copper-colored soil and realized she’d found the direct connection between the earth and her art practice that she’d been looking for.
The aura of delicacy and quietness encoded in Johnston’s palettes of earth pigments opens up within the planes of her paintings, expanding into a bright liveliness of gesture that is all her own. While I’m seated at her studio table, she shows me a series of paintings based on the figures of ancient fertility goddesses. These works on paper feature hovering figures painted with pigments made from blue and gray stones found on the bank of the Little Delaware outside Johnston’s studio. Some of the figures are dotted with pigment made from ochre-colored minerals taken from a bauxite mine in Puglia, Italy. Johnston intentionally layers pigments from various locations in the same painting as a way to acknowledge the convergences and disruptions that happen to the earth itself–the land is mined, extracted from, and the energies of those extractive acts remain with us. These paintings are documents of the artist’s journey but also of the earth’s journey.
She describes her choice to represent ancient fertility goddesses as a meditation on human acts of violence against the feminine. This strikes me as an especially profound way of making art with the body: Johnston creates a direct, intentional relationship with the earth to make her pigments, transmuting that relationship into images that are at once haunting and life-affirming.
“In hindsight, I can see that I was looking for a way to make work with the actual earth, not just about nature or the landscape.”
Johnston catalogs each of her pigments in a notebook, recording the location and date where the material was found, as well as any information on the material itself. The descriptions in Johnston’s notebook become tiny, intimate poems: “Where the earth was open to make/ our driveway. This sliver was exposed. When/ I dripped water on the dry pigment/ it smelled like rain. Like leaves in late fall. May 2023.”
A poetic energy pervades Johnston’s work, where color and image operate in tandem with language and bio-regional knowledge. Pigment-making has been an initiation for Johnston into studying the natural history of the Catskills. Becoming pregnant with her son in 2019 and learning that her son’s ancestors were among the first European settlers to come to this part of New York heightened Johnston’s commitment to getting to know this place we call home.
Her eyes light up as she tells me some of the story of the stones she finds for her pigments along the Little Delaware–380 million years ago; the place we’re sitting was an ocean, and some of these stones were on the bottom of the sea bed. Other stones were glacial erratics left by glaciers that formed during the last ice age. As she’s learned this history, Johnston has also cultivated an ability to listen to the land as she’s working with it — she only uses stones that she finds loose, for instance, never digging or prying stones out of place. She mixes her pigments with water from the places where the pigment was found. She tells me that she also occasionally finds herself putting back stones that she senses don’t want to be taken. She describes this sense as “the integrity of intuition” — an integrity that inquires, persistently, into the relationship of care between the artist’s body and the earth.
Seeing how Johnston creates her materials, I perceive a rich, glowing layer beneath the surface of the paintings in her studio, as vivid as a rocky substrate. Within the vessels and tools of her beautiful studio, the depth of Johnston’s conceptual engagement with her work means that her pictures are always enmeshed with history and ritual. Gesture emerges as an essential thread of continuity between the artist and her work: even Johnston’s gaze and mannerisms are suffused with a sense of care, a warm, easygoing intentionality. There’s a direct line between her physical presence and her embodied acts of making in dialogue with the earth. As the earth’s gestures move through millions of years of transformation, this artist creates gestures in her work that reaffirm a central fact: she has so much to learn from this land.
