About Cheryl Johnson

Cheryl Johnson is an American Abstract Expressionist painter of eminent artistic talent, creating richly layered canvases filled with calligraphic marks and animated by an unequaled material quality of color. She creates rich and profoundly original paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures that are alluring, spontaneous, and beautiful.

"Her art projects an air of optimism, lightness and joy and is infused with both a sense of uniqueness and universality."

“I primarily choose to create abstract non-objective paintings because I find the creative process honest and satisfying. A single mark or line on a blank surface provides a starting point for an intuitive exploration of the visual language found in abstraction. Working in mixed media: graphite, oil, acrylic and collage, allows me to layer and rework textured surfaces - with each painting resulting in a delightful discovery of things explored in the heart, perhaps unseen, but now visited for a while.”

Cheryl Johnson Born in Kellogg, Idaho in 1947 is an Aquarian and of Finnish and Scotch Irish descent. Cheryl is well traveled and has her studios in both Hawaii on the North shore of Kauai and Charlotte, North Carolina.

The emphasis of her work is on strong design, simple shapes, enlivened by textured surfaces. Her use of contrasting, muted and sensitive color has enabled Cheryl to create well balanced visually stimulating art that encourages the viewer to look for answers within themselves.  Cheryl Johnson paints in layers; transparent washes allowing the influx of emotion and the history of ideas to overtly inform her final choice of imagery. Temporality, choice, and an insistent dialogue between reason and emotion are frequent themes in her work, along with a consistent reference to land and sea with a varied use of imagery—often involving a juxtaposition of figurative studies and ethereally imagined forms. Cheryl loves light—and an abandoned visceral use of color. Johnson’s creativity is driven by a general curiosity of life and its meaning, she references her photography as a medium for her art, and explores its boundaries in a quest for beauty and expression that goes beyond realism but gets perhaps a little closer to truth.

Cheryl Johnson graduated from the Oklahoma State University, with a Master Degree in Vocational Education and a Bachelors degree from Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, in Education and Art. Her work is widely collected in the United States and her paintings have been exhibited in multiple galleries, corporations and homes.