Ever since I can remember I have liked to draw and paint, attempting to replicate images I liked. So naturally, I chose art as my major in college receiving a BFA from the local university, and then continuing on to receive a M.S. degree. Those yucky college art history classes exposed me to all kinds of art. My personal likings gravitated to style of the Dutch painters as well as impressionist painters.
Drawing is the foundation for my paintings. It is during this early period of a painting that the composition with the lights and dark shapes are explored and finalized. For many years I painted in a pointillism style, attempting to create my own style of a modern impressionism. This was created with tight singular points of color arranged in a manner which formed the lights, darks and shapes, somewhat like pixels on a television screen. The viewer’s eye will mix the individual points of color creating the expressed image. When I started working with oil several years ago, I found that it allowed some of the colors to bleed over into the neighboring color, giving the painting a different feel than if the same painting had been done in acrylic.
I worked for 20 years as a police officer in order to retire and fund my full time painting endeavor. I usually paint 4-10 hours per day, barring some interferences I can’t avoid. When I’m not painting, I spend my time vacuuming dog and cat hair and flipping a coin with my husband to see whose turn it is to prepare dinner. I usually lose and have to do dishes either way.
I consider myself an uninteresting person who likes to paint beautiful and/or interesting objects. I like to surround myself with beautiful objects which will become future subject matter of my paintings. I think that a detailed and intricate object creates a more interesting and exciting painting. I push myself to focus on the minute details that no one would notice, yet overall they complete the painting. The greatest complement I receive is when I am accused of submitting a photograph in lieu of a painting or Painting over a photograph. I know I’ve hit my mark at that point.
Frankie Johnson is an accomplished artist with over thirty years of teaching experience in oils and pastels. She has owned the Mainstreet Art Centre / School of Fine Art in Lake Zurich, IL for 19 years. She conducts workshops in all subject matter throughout Illinois and Wisconsin. Her paintings are represented by the Joan Champeau Pioneer Gallery in Sister Bay, WI.
Frankie was a finalist in Artists’s magazine competitions, had a painting featured in International Artists and won a Merit Award in an Oil Painters of America Exhibit. She also won Best of Show in the Landscape category at the Richeson 75 International Art Competitions and had several paintings featured in their Still Life, Floral, Figure, Landscape and Small Paintings Books.
Also juried into the Easton, Maryland, Plein Air competition where she won “Best Marine Painting” and invited twice to participate in Door County’s Plein Air Competition with 40 other artists from around the country. She won 2nd place in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, Plein Air competition last year and received several Honorable Mentions. She has been a Finalist several times for the Ray Mar on-line painting competitions.
Frankie currently has a painting in the Oil Painters of America 2013 Eastern Regional Juried Exhibition in Annapolis, Maryland and in the American Impressionist Society National Exhibition in Charleston, SC. She was a selected artist to exhibited in the first Juried Salon Show of Traditional Oils for the Oil Painters of America this summer in Petosky, Michigan. www.frankiejohnsonartstudio.com