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2.

In the smiling little fishing village of Kerteminde, Denmark, where the Johnsons made their home, he intrigued the native folk with what his painter's eye saw in the gardens, the old houses, and the clusters of red roofs.

"His art is a form of expressionism, a dynamic one, which never really has flowered here in Denmark", wrote a Danish art critic. "For him and all those who can master it, that close feeling of life evident in lines and colors is something very important which makes the motif live in one's consciousness. Just take a look at the street which waves in and out among the red roofs of Kerteminde. They make the gray line of the street swing out and glow through the 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 one 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 - a;; that which has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition. Therefore, I do not paint like a German does, whose intellectuality 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 all 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 painted many portraits of the natives, as did his wife. Both, also worked on ceramics, learning -- as trusted companions -- 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".  His paintings catch 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 distance snow-capped mountains.

"It is Nature herself", "Look at the sun shining on the snowy mountains, take a red or yellow flower; there is a wealth of intense colors not matter where one looks".