Andrew Ellis Johnson

NOTES ON ALLEGORY IN MY WORK

 

The selected ten slides are from a series of distempera, oil and acrylic paintings on canvas and linen entitled Desperate Tales: Anxious Allegories.  In them, I employ recognizable figurative imagery to address the widest audience possible.  The scale of these banners allows ample room for the joy of material investigation.  The playfulness of their animal and human caricatures are indebted to Choju Jimbutsu Giga's ink paintings of the Heian Period (12th century) at Kozan-ji, Kyoto.  Through them, I wish to reflect the nakedness and simplicity of childhood expression.  Nevertheless they are imbued with bitter, if dreamlike, socio-political observations.  Our technology portends an increasingly complete, and belies an increasingly biased world view, which our children, as we ourselves, take for granted.  The overload of information, and the unasked questions it produces, we take with us to sleep.

 

Dreams can be a way of discussing certain messages that the conscious mind is not yet willing to accept.  Unconscionable aspects of our social relations and lives frequently infect my dreams.  Many of the images displayed are distillations of the day's residue that crystallize at night in dreams later remembered or dismembered as the case may be.  The immediacy and directness of unmediated imagery infuses the paintings with lyricism unencumbered by the more distant act of "reading" these allegories. An allegory is made when you say one thing but mean another.  They are more complicated, contradictory and camouflaged than an ironic quip of inverse meaning (where, for example, "bad" means "good" or vice versa).  Allegories are obscure, run the risk of being misunderstood, or not communicating at all.  So why, when, and under what circumstances have I resorted to masking my messages through allegory?

 

I throw open the question to my viewers, asking them: are there any moral, political or intimate comments they would like to privately or publicly proclaim or confide?  What would they like to say that wouldn't be heard or taken to heart if said in so many words?  For me, encountering an allegory is much like holding an untamed serpent's skin.  Externally transparent in their means of expression, allegories aim for the most complete clarity.

 

I have employed scale, simplicity and whimsical characterization in an attempt to make them the most accessible to you, whatever your age.  But just like the absent serpent we can't help but thinking about while grasping its peeling, the meanings in these allegories are difficult to keep in place.  Allegories are slippery.  They invite reading yet remain ultimately elusive.  As you create multiple meanings from the paintings before you, I hope that they will stimulate your imagination.  The paintings are the tangible sheaths left behind, but the unleashed power of the serpent remains within your mind.