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PURE AND CLEAR: Johnson painted
the hospital ship USS Haven with pure
transparent watercolor. “There’s no
white paint here,” she says.
Rod Searcey |
she was a highly trained artist
who didn’t know what to paint.
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Courtesy Patricia Johnson
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“I had studied with some of the major plein air
watercolorists in California, learning to paint everything
you could think of,” says Pat Johnson of her first
five years out of college. “My Stanford professor
[Daniel Mendelowitz] said it was time to stop studying
and just get out there and paint.”
But what? Determined to master the hardest outdoor
subject she could find, the Long Beach artist chose
boats.
Boats, she says, pose challenges similar to the human
figure. “You have to know the proportions and
anatomy; you start from the core. Each boat has a personality.
Every boat leans in a certain way —I like to go
aboard and get a feel for that. Often, I paint a boat
while it’s moving, which is difficult because
the point of reference and lighting constantly change.”
Johnson spent her days at the harbor and shipyards,
painting fishing boats, freighters, yachts and Navy
gunboats. There she met and became a protégée
of watercolorist Arthur Beaumont, an official Navy combat
artist. In the early 1960s, Johnson received that designation
herself, becoming the Navy’s sole female combat
artist on the West Coast and one of just a handful in
the nation.
The Navy began commissioning accomplished civilian
artists in 1941, reasoning that “unlike the objective
camera lens, the artist not only captures instantaneous
action but can fuse earlier moments into a compelling
image.” Navy combat artists don’t always
work under combat conditions. Johnson has painted ships,
submarines, helicopters and aircraft at the Navy base
in Long Beach as well as at sea, “but never while
the ship was under fire—they wouldn’t let
me,” she says.
Her first big solo exhibition, which opened in Los
Angeles in 1974 and toured for several years thereafter,
featured 55 works chronicling Navy history since the
late 19th century. Today, hundreds of her paintings
are displayed in the Pentagon, on ships, in Navy installations,
in military museums and in private collections.
Johnson uses only pure transparent watercolor, wet
into wet with dry brush accent—a demanding medium
that gives her works luminosity, she says. Still living
on the coast (in Palos Verdes, a half-hour north of
Long Beach), she continues to paint boats while teaching,
lecturing and promoting the arts through numerous organizations.
Lately, she’s been painting something different:
portraits of vintage cars, most recently a moody depiction
of Fred Astaire’s 1927 Rolls Royce after a downpour
in Beverly Hills.
Going from warships to celebrity vehicles isn’t
so much of a leap when you consider the artist’s
roots. Her father was marine engineer Ted Geary, who
designed Navy ships during World War II and later designed
yachts for Hollywood stars. Johnson—surely his
most impressive creation of all—says wistfully,
“He died too young to see what I could do.”
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