Cole Johnson | Into the Wild

Cole Johnson’s artworks immerse viewers in the poetry of the natural world

BY NORMAN KOLPAS

This story was featured in the November 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

HE STARES AT YOU, indomitable, his broad shoulders and massive head filling most of the 8-by-4-foot frame. From across the room, his eyes draw you in: one glinting with light, the other receding into darkest shadow, both watching you, expressing a calm yet powerful readiness. Moving closer, you notice detail after detail. The end of his nose glistens with moisture. Beneath his chin, saliva shines on his dripping beard. Above those unwavering eyes, sunlight and shadow sculpt the weaponry of his horns. “He’s a real serious guy,” says artist Cole Johnson of his life-size charcoal-on-paper BISON. “Don’t turn your back on him,” he adds with a wry laugh.

That quip underscores a quality inherent in all of Johnson’s artworks—pieces he’s reluctant to call drawings despite the medium in which he creates them. Each animal image he captures, through a painstaking process employing powdered charcoal or graphite, possesses a persuasively lifelike, highly dimensional immediacy that can make viewers forget they’re looking at a flat, monochrome surface. At the same time, these pieces are elevated beyond highly convincing realism into the realm of exceptionally fine art thanks to his subtle yet effective manipulations of composition, light and shadow, point of view, and focus. “That’s the idea,” he says, “to create art rather than just trying to show people how well I can draw a particular animal.”

JOHNSON GREW UP surrounded by nature in the small upstate New York town of Greene, just north of Binghamton. With his parents and grandparents, he went hunting and fishing in the local woods, fields, and streams. “My sister and I certainly grew up eating a lot of venison and fish,” he recalls, “though it wasn’t the majority of our table fare.” More importantly than providing some sustenance, those expeditions fed another need in him. “I think the beginnings of my artistic progression were founded in a love of the outdoors, from growing up in that very rural setting.”

From his early years, Johnson drew. “I’ve just always had this love and knack for drawing, even as a very young child. As I got better and better at it, my teachers and peers would notice.” His sketches were included in a local student art show and, he adds, “I was encouraged to go into art school. That’s the path he embarked on after graduating from Greene Central High School. First he moved up to Utica, NY, to attend Mohawk Valley Community College, enrolling in its commercial art program. Studio classes at the college were conducted at the nearby Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, associated with an outstanding local art museum of the same name. Eventually, he transferred to Munson-Williams-Proctor’s own two-year arts program and then moved on to the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York, where he graduated in 1991 with a degree in fine art.

Throughout his course of study, he tried to focus on subjects in the natural world, taking photographs with a 35mm camera for reference. “What got me into art school was a portfolio of drawings of wildlife. But my professors kept wanting to break me out of this mold. They didn’t want to see me get pigeonholed by drawing, and so they would tell me to leave wildlife and representational art alone and stop using the camera.” Though he resisted, those admonitions did have one profound effect on him: “I learned that you’d better understand how to use photographic references, or you’re going to get a lot of flat-looking art.”

After leaving Utica and returning to the area near his hometown, Johnson supported himself with construction jobs while starting to build a career as a fine artist. He refers to a series of individual successes as “stepping stones,” adding that, over the years, he would have “an occasional interesting success where you’d get into an exhibition or meet somebody who encouraged you, and you’d just start pushing through the hard times and keep going.”

One important early stepping stone came in February 1994, when his work was juried into the Southeastern Wildlife Exposition in Charleston, SC, the largest exhibition of its kind in the nation. Johnson has been included in that show every year since, and it connected him with leading artists like John Seerey-Lester and Robert Bateman, as well as bringing him a publisher for limited-edition prints. Other top show invitations fol-lowed, including one to the annual Western Visions Show & Sale at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, WY.

By the mid-1990s, Johnson was able to leave construction work behind and devote himself full time to his art. He often forged his own path, which included creating prints—“a lot of sporting dogs and waterfowl hunting”—that he sold to a waiting audience of sportsmen. Meanwhile, he kept his living costs low, plowing everything back into his business, including a trailer with nice display units that he could tow behind his pickup truck to art fairs and shows. “I was driving all over the country, getting the right kind of exposure in the right kind of venues,” he recalls.

As his experience, successes, and sales grew, he eventually settled down, buying a home on 20 acres in the area he’s known since childhood. That’s where he now lives with Mary, his wife since 2000, and their 16-year-old daughter, Abigail. “We’re surrounded by old farmland that has grown back to nature, with woods and fields and streams running through, and a lot of indigenous species. I don’t have to go far to get references for my art.”

ONCE HE’S CHOSEN a reference photo, he’ll develop his composition in a sketchbook before beginning a process he’s developed and refined to the point that, by his estimate, he now uses it for “90 percent or more” of his works. He’ll place his chosen sheet of paper on the floor and sprinkle it evenly with powdered charcoal or graphite, usually preferring the former because it doesn’t become shiny and reflect light when heavily worked. “Then I manipulate and scrub it around with a dry sponge or a little cross-section of a foam swim noodle, pushing the stuff around the page, working dry. It gives me a really uniform-looking light gray on the whole page.” That prep work concluded, he transfers the paper to his drawing board or, for larger works, to the wall.

Next, using a charcoal pencil, he’ll lightly transfer the sketch of his composition to the gray surface—“you can barely see it, but it’s there,” he notes. From that point on, he works and reworks the surface, darkening the dark areas with more charcoal, using a block eraser to lighten those parts of the image he wants to be paler gray or even white, all the while continually moving from one part of the surface to another so that the final result will have the kind of harmonious impact he desires. “None of this is by accident,” he says. “Everything is done for a reason. These are not drawings. My hand is not good enough to draw it one time and say, ‘Voilà!’ They are really manipulated over time, pushing and pulling the medium and the tonal value, so much so in some locations that the paper begins to be abraded.” Finally, Johnson gives the piece three or four applications of matte fixative spray to secure its surface. And that surface is secure in the extreme. “Charcoal and graphite are both carbon, the most stable compound found on earth, and I use 100 percent rag acid-free paper.” In other words, the images will not fade or degrade over time.

The results are surpassingly, often poetically beautiful. Consider, for instance, THE TAKE, which depicts a brown trout turning as it grabs something from the surface of the water. With its underwater perspective—Johnson used a small waterproof camera to grab reference shots—and its swirling composition of rippling patterns, dark depths, and shimmering lights, at first glance “it’s very hard to understand what’s going on,” says the artist. “It’s a borderline abstraction, based in reality.”

As another example, his MOONLIGHT DRIFTER evokes a powerful sense of beauty and solitude in its depiction of a lone gray wolf striding across a snow-packed field in Yosemite in early spring. To emphasize the animal’s solitary spirit, Johnson used a straightedge to make the bold line of the near horizon, with one side light gray and the other deepest black, while erasing the graphite just in front of the wolf’s muzzle to capture his breath’s condensation in the chilly air. “That puts a sense of life into the animal,” the artist says.

When it comes to lifelike depictions, nothing quite compares to Johnson’s recent large-scale works, which he began exploring a few years ago after being encouraged by Greg Fulton of Astoria Fine Art in Jackson. It still feels like a new approach for him. When working on a recent 8-foot image of a moose, for example, he notes that the work has “got to mature evenly. I’m very careful not to get too caught up in any one area, not to use up all my time on one little 6-inch square. You build it slowly over time, and the more you work on different areas, the more rich they become, not only in detail but in contrast. The highlights and darks mature, and it becomes more dramatic. I want the artwork to be impactful at a great distance, and to be as impactful up close.”

Ultimately, Johnson’s goal is for his works to be at “as high a level of artistic integrity as I can make them,” he says. And while he’s sensitive to present-day concerns about the global environmental crisis, “I try to stay out of the political arena,” he stresses. Nonetheless, he finds satisfaction in the knowledge that those who view his images may yet be positively transformed by them. “I like the fact that I produce artwork that, maybe, will make people more aware of the natural world.”

representation
Astoria Fine Art, Jackson, WY; Painted Finch Gallery, Corry, PA; www.colejohnsonart.com.

This story was featured in the November 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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