While I am influenced by the southern tradition of narrative figure painting, my work focuses mainly on drawing. My drawings have paint, of course, but they are not really paintings-the drawn line is what tells the tale. I use painting and mixed media elements enhance the mark making, and reassert the shallow space of the picture plane. The pops and veils of color and the stained surfaces provide a ragged sort of embellishment. But line is what makes the edges and directs the characters and each mark provides a kind of unstable punctuation.My drawings are informed by psychoanalytic theory, symbolist poetry, and absurdist humor. Each work has a cast of characters, images and elements, in flattened landscapes or ambiguous spaces. I set up these vignettes as a way of investigating what makes people be the way they are, but I am the worst sort of detective. I just like to pile up clues and rearrange them into melancholic jokes, farcical calamities and occasional moments of grace.

Katherine Jill Johnson

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