Elisa Johns

Elisa Johns pays homage to the beauty of the California landscape in her delicate paintings and works on paper. Johns received a BFA from the University of California, San Diego, and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Her landscapes are based on photographs the artist takes while hiking, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains. She also renders romantic floral arrangements and figurative works with implied narratives. An important aspect of Johns’s practice is addressing the dominance of male artists in the canon of landscape painting and inserting a feminine point of view into the masculine associations of the American West. To that end, she frequently paints mythological female figures like Athena and Nike in her “Huntress” series (2010) enjoying the outdoors. Venus is also a favorite character. A notable stylistic trait in Johns’s work is the dominance of white in her compositions, creating an expansive, open atmosphere. Johns’s exalted scenes of nature are also influenced by Japanese painting traditions.