The late Lucas Johnson’s ink drawings and delicate silverpoints were lauded by curator Walter Hopps as literary journeys, imagist forays into a juxtaposition of everyday life with fantastic surrealism. The self-taught artist, along with his wife—critic and gallerist Patricia Covo Johnson—traveled extensively to Mexico City in the 1960s, taking full advantage of his contact with artists Leonora Carrington and José Luis Cuevas, as well as filmmaker Luis Buñuel, to expand his growing definition of humanist art. Johnson’s interest in sexuality explodes in lewd sketches like Raining Cats and Dogs, 1987; Pelt, 1990; and Woman with a Friendly Kitten, 2000, in which a doe-eyed woman pets a tiny cat under her sundress; she leers directly at the viewer and ostensibly at the artist at an earlier time.
A series of large ink-wash drawings is capped by The Hero, 1990, in which an upright sarcophagus, bedecked in feathers and patches of checkerboard, stands on a barren field of roughed-up gray washes and sharp splatters. Works from the series “Gulf Coast Estuaries,” 1986–88, illustrate Johnson’s love for fishing, eating, people watching, and spending time with his friends. Victory at Seaworld, 1987, is dominated by a fish walking on surreal, spindly legs, catching an eel-like creature by the tail; meanwhile, groups of tourists, rendered as caricatures, are dropped onto the beach by what appear to be elevators. In The Horizon Line, 1987, twisted ladders lead up and off the page as masses of sea turtles and a school of shrimp swim through disembodied frames, one of which seems to contain a helmeted figure—perhaps a self-portrait. Two flounder wait at the right, staring out of the black water and gnashing their teeth. In his art, full of political, religious, and personal observations, Johnson delighted both in line work and in the intense satisfaction of imperfection.
