Month: December 2023

The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to announce the opening of UNCOMMON GROUND, an exhibition of paintings and collages by Scott Johnson. An opening reception will be held at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara on Friday, January 12, from 5-7 pm. Johnson will present an Artist Talk on February 10th at 2 pm.

Johnson is the Founding Design Partner of Johnson Fain, an international, award-winning architecture, urban design + planning, and interiors firm based in Los Angeles, and a long-time mixed-media artist. His paintings and collages chronicle his interest in the interplay between rational thinking and intuition, which translates to a visual dialogue between geometric forms and free forms, between logical pre-planning and invention and spontaneity. Added to the mix are familiar elements from our current media landscape in conversation with more personal, inscrutable ones.

The artistic persona of this multi-talented architect blossomed during the Covid months as he layered fragments of photographs, snippets of text, acrylic paint, and oil stick atop one another to create depth and texture and to bury certain meanings while allowing others to emerge. The process is both additive and subtractive, reminiscent of the evolution of cities such as Rome, Tokyo, and New York, and a fitting source of his unique artistic energy and renewal.

Johnson states: I always seem to be drawn to a process of positioning one thing against another as a way to build tension in the artwork. Life offers us a universe of choices and we constantly navigate between differences, the outcome of which is our work and who we are. In many ways, it’s an exploration of self.