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KERTEMINDE HARBOR - Oil

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JACOBIA HOTEL, FLORENCE, S.C. - Oil

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OLD DANISH HOUSES - Watercolor

colors of the red brick." He painted the old thatched houses of the town, curving around the crooked streets, so that one almost feels that Hansel and Gretel are about to appear.

Johnson Takes Pride in His Heritage Of The Primitive
He approached the Danish fishermen as fellow primitives, for Johnson himself took pride in his own simple home-spun background. "I myself feel like a primitive man," he said, "Like on who is at the same time both a primitive and a cultured painter. With me, being primitive is something inborn. I just cannot be otherwise... European art also strives to be primitive, but it does not seem able to reach it, because it does not have the primitive inherent factor. My aim is to express in a natural way what I feel both rhythmically and spiritually-all that which has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition. Therefore, I do not paint like a German does, whose intellectually and science in time have reached so high that it is just pure force; he will express that in his art."

Simple people, Johnson felt, understand the meaning of art better than the so-called cultivated man. "We are closer to the sun," he said. To him, the Danish fisher-folk were genuine and uncomplicated. He shows his compatibility with them in his paintings of them and their surroundings-the harbors, the docks, the boats. They have the aura of salt, tar and herring drying; the lonely man of the sea and his convivial life ashore.

In North Africa, where he and Holcha spent several months in 1933, he was in complete rapport with the native Arabs, for his own appearance-light brown skin and black beard, led them to think he was one of them lately returned from America. He found delight in the rhythms of the colorful bazaars, and the mosques and he painted portraits of the natives, as he did his wife; both worked on ceramics, learning-as trusted companions- the age-old secrets of colors and baking from the natives. "The fishermen in Kerteminde and the Arabs are the people from whom I have learned the most," says Johnson.

The "Vagabonding" Couple Visits The North
As the Johnsons vagabonded, bicycling and tenting, across Norway, he revelled in the bright and beautiful colors of the country. "We noticed them at Volda in the district of Sunnmore," the artist said in an interview. "It did not take the rural people long to see the beauty of the colors." He caught the clean, fresh look of Spring with the apple blossoms fairly tumbling from the trees, the clear water of the deep fiords and the blue of the distant snow-capped mountains.

"It is Nature herself," he said. "Look at the sun shining on the snowy mountains, take a red or yellow flower; there is a wealth of intense colors no matter where on looks."

"He has found colors in Nature that Nordic painters have been forced to go to France to find," says a Swedish art critic of Johnson's Norway paintings. The Norwegians felt that Johnson had brought the whole landscape back with him from the Lofoten Islands (Svolvaer) and the far northern city of Tromsoe. Equally impressed were the people of Stockholm when he exhibited his Norway paintings there and they saw the fairy-tale mountains, rising into the unscalable sharp peaks and sometimes a few sheepherders' huts huddle in the foreground as if they dared to be cozy in such awesome surroundings!

"Johnson is a primitive," said Pola Gaugin, critic-son of the great painter, as he viewed these Norwegian landscapes, "with a marked sense for simplicity with colors whose appeal to the eye is chiefly decorative.... In spite of a very obvious French influence, there is something in the nature of his forms and lines, which has great original charm and is a definite expression of a viewpoint and perceptions and are very much different from the European, even when the latter strives to give a primitive impression."

Both Paint In The Land Of The Midnight Sun
When the artist couple took the small fiord streamer from Aalesund north to Tromsoe, further into the land of the midnight sun, they immersed themselves in this awesome display of Nature and both of them painted. Theirs was, indeed, a marriage of complete artistic devotion. Johnson's hand reproduced the gigantic and exotic with explosive colors; Holcha's pictures were "richer in detail, but their colors warm and beautiful. His is a catchy and resounding overture, but there are also many quiet and melodious themes which will be enjoyed by all who will listen." (Critic Gnist in Trondheim (Norway) newspaper.)

Their home in Svolvaer on the Lofoten Islands was truly a paradise for such sensitive people, for here they faced the west and watched the sun go down on the horizon and start right back up again. Their work went on around the clock, he painting and she weaving on her copy of the Baldershol Tapestry.