Alexander Johnson

Alexander Johnson holding ROSA Magazine Issue 12, Spring 2025, cover featuring his artwork.

Weald Contemporary is thrilled to welcome the talented Alexander Johnson as the next guest artist for our upcoming Drink and Draw session on Wednesday, 7th May. Known for his expressive style and dynamic use of colour, Johnson brings a fresh and imaginative energy to everything he creates. This special event offers a unique opportunity to meet the artist behind the work, gain insight into his creative process, and sketch alongside him in an inspiring, relaxed setting. In this interview, we dive into Alexander’s artistic journey, his influences, and what attendees can look forward to during the session.

Your work has long drawn from music, film, and literature as much as visual art. In an era when algorithms shape so much of what we see and hear, how do you keep your influences intentional rather than passive?

 Alexander- Good question! I sometimes feel my senses getting poisoned by unsolicited digital content but we are all to some extent influenced by the targeted algorithms whether we like it or not. To temper those influences, I constantly block content that I either find banal or annoying (for whatever reason) so that on my Instagram feed I’m left mainly with things I’m already interested in - 1970’s graphic design, B&W social documentary photos, old paintings - so that now what I see on my feed aligns quite closely with what I would choose if I was I to go into a library for books. I have always ignored cultural things that are hugely ‘popular’ with the mainstream; if it’s very popular it’s quite probably worthless.

 What are you reading at the moment?

 Alexander- I’ve been reading a book called Women Painters by Lucy Davies. Prior to that I’d just finished a book on Orientalism and the artist Jean Léon-Géròme and I’ve got my nose in a couple of Goya monograms, which I’m referencing in the new paintings. I read art books in the day and then novels before I sleep. Currently re-reading M Train by Patti Smith for my book at bedtime. Also anything by Olivia Laing.

“People often tell me my work feels like someone reaching out,” you once said. In a world dominated by screens, do you feel painting still offers that tactile emotional link that’s getting lost elsewhere?

Alexander- Painting is an activity unique to humans, to an extent everyone can relate to a painting because everyone will have made a painting themselves at some point in their life. I think post-covid there has been an increase in respect for artisans who use ‘old-fashioned’ (ie. Pre-digital) skills to make something tangible, a physical object. Programmes like the Pottery Showdown, Sewing Bee and the Repair Shop have become hugely popular because people love to watch skilled workers doing their thing, myself included. Equally, when you know an object is the result of hours of skilled human concentration, I think most people, even children, instinctively realise its value.

Photo: M. Rawlinson

The digital world is so transient I can’t really take it seriously. The day after a ‘new iPhone’ drops it’s already out of date. But the Mona Lisa or Picasso’s Guernica will never be out of date. I think art collectors and people in general will still want paintings, objects, things they can hold, feel and hang on the wall to decorate and enrich their home space. I think collectors appreciate the continuum that starts with the first oil paintings in the 14th century and runs a continuous line through the Renaissance connecting to what contemporary oil painters are making today. People won’t want to buy stuff that they can make themselves at home on their laptop using AI and a laser printer. So AI doesn’t worry me at all, nobody can make one of my physical paintings apart from me and that won’t change in my lifetime.

You’ve often spoken about the influence of punk – the Clash, DIY bands, the rawness of the scene. Does punk as a philosophy still guide your choices when you’re working with Old Master references and historic subjects?

Alexander- I still consider myself a punk. By that I mean, I just get on and do stuff in my own way. I take what I need from the past, a composition here, a character there, then glue them back together in my head, then paint it. A lot of the old masters were punks in their day, they were rebels who didn’t follow rules and challenged the established order, they copied things from the past and remade them to their own design. These artists were difficult, confrontational and brave people who were often in trouble with the church and their wealthy patrons for not doing what they were told. All good artists have a punk sensibility really, they don’t care much what went before or what is ‘popular’ at the time, they dance to their own tune and make their own rules. The only thing they have in common is hard work.

Can you tell us a bit more about your current solo exhibition Where are we Now? At Rogue Gallery and what you are currently working on?

 Alexander- I aim for at least one good solo exhibition a year in the UK. The recent exhibition came about after a friend introduced me to Ray Gange the director at Rogue Gallery in St Leonards. I’d been painting the lead models for about a year which Ray saw on Instagram and liked. I was interested in showing at his gallery because I liked some of the artists he had shown there in the past. Ray and I got on immediately and I subsequently found out that he had been a roadie for the Clash in the late 1970’s at around the time I first saw them aged 15 and decided to go to art college. This gave us a platform of respect and mutual understanding that made me feel completely confident in working with him because I knew he’d get the references in my paintings and be open to leftfield ideas, changes of direction and wouldn’t be fearful of more challenging content in the work.

CEASEFIRE!

Oil on canvas, 160 x 180cm (2025)

 You once said, “You don’t want to give people everything: you want to give them little bits of something.” That feels especially poignant today, when so much art is consumed in a swipe or scroll. How do you create work that asks people to slow down, look longer, maybe even come back to it again?

Alexander- try to create images that have an initial impact but then enough depth of detail to keep you looking and enjoying new things. I want to leave people some space to feel their own way through a narrative painting, so I offer hints and clues rather than setting out a completely understandable narrative. I do this by playing with colour, composition, scale (often enlarging things hugely) and just not doing the obvious or the expected. I don’t think too much while I’m actually painting. Though I’m slightly wary of the expression, I will admit that I have to get myself ‘in the zone’ before I start, this will often mean two days reading, choosing records, building up a wave of energy in my head and then eventually transferring that onto the canvas. I don’t really know what happens and I don’t need to know, as long as I can still paint it I’m ok.

 Thanks Alex! finally, please create a 10 track studio playlist - this can be recent favourites or a greatest hits!

Alexander- This is completely impossible for a music lover like me, but off the top of my head!