Kerry Johns began painting in the 1970s after training as an art teacher in Brisbane and moving to Sydney. There she studied with John Ogburn, prior to leaving for Europe for an extended two-year study tour of European galleries. She has lived and worked in the Blue Mountains, the Eurobodalla coast and since 2011 has been a resident of Canberra with a studio at ANCA.
Johns exhibited throughout her children’s early years winning the Blue Mountains Art Prize in 1995. In 1997 she gained City of the Arts funding for a project Blue Air Red Earth. She exhibited this work in Katoomba and Sydney in 1998 and at the Broken Hill City Art Gallery in 1999.
In 2000 she revisited memories of her Queensland childhood in the exhibition Homeground at the Caloundra Regional Gallery, stimulating a turn to abstraction in a new engagement with memory, coastal landscape and a more direct relationship to the environment.
In 2002 and 2004 she exhibited the continuing theme of ‘mythic landscapes’ at Ezair Gallery in New York, where Ed McCormack in Studio and Gallery wrote that “few contemporary artists are as acutely attuned to the nuances of paint handling”.
Since 1996 Johns continued exhibiting with Katoomba Fine Art and in 2005 was invited to take part in the Kedumba Drawing Prize from which her work Night Shore was added to the Kedumba Collection.
At this time she moved to the Eurobodalla coast and the stimulus of plein air painting and new subjects. These works have a rich linear layering and a preoccupation with subtle colour relationships. Johns won the Basil Sellers Prize in 2008 and exhibited at Ivy Hill Gallery on the south coast in 2009 and 2011.
In 2010 she began exhibiting with Charles Hewitt Gallery, Sydney, and in 2012 with Chapman Gallery, Canberra. Her exhibition 'taking Place’ at Chapman Gallery in 2012 showed a shift in interest towards tonal relationships and a simplification of colour, shape and rhythm.
In her 2013 show 'Under Southern Skies’ at Charles Hewitt Gallery, there is an evident trust in the language of abstraction and a confidence in the spacious treatment of form which accords with her move to the Monaro landscape.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
zauthor
kerry_johns
duggim
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2014
