Artist Focus: Emma Stone Johnson

Hi, it’s lovely to virtually too. Thank you! My name is Emma and I live in Hove. I’m an artist and also a mother. I decided quite last minute back on Dec 19 to apply to do a Masters in Painting at The Royal College of Art. I was elated to gain a place. I’ve now just started my final year and already dreaming up my final show…! Due summer 22!

It’s a body of work that started in the early summer (2021) at the RCA studios there’s definitely ‘summer’ on the surfaces. ‘Elegant complexity’ isn’t a name I came up with but I’m hugely interested in the complexity of colour. I will never get bored experimenting and learning about colour. As the artist, Winifred Nicholson wrote, ‘Can your eyes see a hint of this unknown colour between the outer bright rainbow and its echo?’ I’m forever on a quest to find a new colour, I often imagine what it would be like, what it would be called and how it would feel. I read a lot of poetry and I write lots too. I write and then I paint and back again. I’m often thinking about films I’ve seen too and childhood memories. My most recent painting is called ‘Elphaba’ I was entranced as a little kid with the colour of ‘her’ skin.

Thank you! Style I think you don’t find, it’s within you already. Perhaps you excavate it – which of course takes bravery, you’re then bearing your soul to an audience. I’m a daydreamer. My childhood bedroom was always a soft blue, my childhood cat was grey and white, his eyes were green, bright, iridescent, his delicate paw pads were warm and pink. My grandmother saved sweet wrappers and I collaged with them often. Noticing the colour changing when I over lapped them or held them in front of the sun.

Again, as I work the painting talks to me. Colour is so nourishing, healing. it can bring back memories that have been forgotten. A title might come from a line of a much larger piece of writing.

The painting inspires the next painting, each colour inspires the next colour, each mark inspires the next… – finding their opposite or their complimentary. I recently went to the Scottish highlands, the grand scale of the sky, the scale of the mountains, the low light – travel definitely enriches my practice. Also, I read a lot of poetry. I particularly love ‘bluets’ by Maggie Nelson a book all about the love of one colour – blue.

Cecily Brown her paintings continually move they dizzy the eye they are ambitious and secret at the same time. She’s also a woman, alive and working now!

Helen Frankenthaler – gutsy and brave.

Hilma af Klimt, she was arguably the first abstract painter – her paintings sing, they’re alive!

Laura Owens bold, bright, clever texture. Also a successful woman living now and working now.

The poets Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson – their words lift you to other regions of time! Golden.

Usually just my most recent.