Biography: Alison McMahon Johnson

M.A. CSULB in Art, specialization in watercolor figure painting B.A. CSULB, Art, specializations in Art Education, Printmaking Secondary (k-14) Teaching Credential in Art and English. In the US, I'm in the right place, perhaps, at the wrong time: just as I certified in the field I love and have great enthusiasm for teaching, the bottom dropped out of funding for real Art Education. I went back for my MA degree, so I could qualify for teaching Art at the Community College level and up. Somehow, the market for those jobs dried up the moment I went out looking; I did, however, find a wonderful job bringing Art and Artists to "the underprivileged," although I had to register for unemployment in order to be able to qualify, which was mortifying to me at the time, but proved to be a valuable skill for my years in the US, where I have continued to be overqualified and underemployed in terms of working in public schools on any sort of a permanent basis. I left for Taiwan, where I was rather uncomfortable the first ffour or five years I was there, married to the wrong person. I divorced him and stayed on and found that the total ten years I spent there were the best in my life: at last I found a place I fit in. In terms of being an educated person, an Artist, and a Teacher, I was in the right place at the right time and I have never been happier on an all-round basis. I also took up running with the Hash House Harriers -- I took up running in order to curb my perfectionism. Competitive sports have always eluded me, so I forced myself to take up something that many other people would always be better at. It was a natural move on over to Hash House Harriers, as it is a rough and tumble cross-country hares and hounds game in which competition is discouraged: indeed, in some places, the "winners" (a derogatory term) are punished or rewarded, depending on which way you look at it, by having to down a full beer before starting the next week's run. I did some of my best painting there, and the HHH was a prime resource for getting pictures I had always wanted to get and found no way to: the runs were always outside of the city and we would see vistas of unimaginable beauty from the ridges of the hills/mountains around Taipei. I began to carry a small camera, an Olympus, so that I could snap pictures of the farmhouses I so loved, and had studied up on, in Taiwan. Central to the land on which the family farmed, In the city, they were surrounded on four sides by tall cement apartment buildings; the family had parcelled off the land over time, a tragedy of modern mobility -- one which I fear will befall me. I would love to keep the family home in which I spent so much time over my adult years ("a daughter's a daughter for all of her life") ; my brother is all numbers and already approached me accusingly, "Mother says you want this house. Do you think that's fair?" He caught me so off base that I didn't get it into perspective, didn't think to tell him that he should ask our Mother about that, not me: she was telling him of her wishes, and no one's wishes but his own matter to him: he has always felt slighted by being born later than I, and now I am going to pay for the accident of birth order; one of those hate crimes that happen within families, and one which we all think, until it happens, "Oh, no: something like that would never happen to our family." My first farmhouse was one I painted from the roof of my apartment building in a suburb, or division, of Taipei. Surrounded by bamboo, it was not visible from the alley. From the rooftop, I could see the house and courtyard and the timeless scene of the little ones in red sweaters playing on the grey cement in front of the red-orange brick house with its flying eaves. I noticed that they were disappearing quickly during that time, and historical preservation was not of any importance then (it never is, until everything's lost, in spite of the Cassandras' cries to preserve what is already there; older craftsmanship outstrips newer in terms of the human touch). The next one I did was in the same area and I happened on it in a taxi ride and hurried to photograph and paint it. At that time, I had started running with the HHH and was showing at the American Club of China; my good friend, a member, said, "You know, that little farmhouse you love? You could have sold it ten times over." Running with the HHH, farmhouses en situ became accessible, set up narrow path-roads that only motorcycles and the special mini-trucks could reach. Also, with an increased abililty to mover around places because of going farther on foot, I collected photos whenever I could and made the series, "Endangered Species." Development of painting: I work in series. My Master's Exhibit was ten paintings of friends, painted in watercolor on location, sitting in their favorite spot to sit when visiting. The premise was a visual one with astrological associations providing a focus for the connections between the person and his/her "things:" that the things one surrounds oneself reflect the inner being of that person. It was titled "Backgrounds," and sucessfully explored that theme and brought credibility/proof to the thesis. Next, I did a 196-piece tile mural, installed in Bayshore Branch Library in Long Beach called "Time and Tide." Each tile represented another high and/or low tide seen from the studio over a nine-month period. Each tile was fired 4 to 7 times between layers of paint to give them the luminosity and depth of water and watercolors. Assembled and laid out chronologically, the new moons and full moons can clearly be seen: the highs and lows are greater during the full and new moons, and so visual differences in the flavor of the tiles occur with the regularity of the phases of the moon. It is a conceptual piece, in that it displays time; at the same time it is a traditional watercolor, done by close observation of the water at that point in time and attempting to portray it as realistically and as spontaneously as possible. Durintg that time, and until I left for Taiwan, I was doing portraits of the old Navy bars in Long Beach, with their fanciful names and colorful signage. In Taipei, I did a two-year long still life project, one painting for each season, which was a still-life ot found objects and fruit from that season. At the same time, I was painting from photographs odd things I found around town. I had wanted to continue doing location painting and found it nearly impossible, as many people all walk about there wherever you are. Those paintings were of the expressions of people I saw in passing by -- their facial and/or physical expressions, set in an urban scene, accent on the signage again. Many that were primarily a still-life were different food displays by the small street-level shops that line the streets. That series was entitled "Mien," a bilingual play on words. In Chinese, "mien" means "face;" it also means "noodles;" in English, "mien" means environment, mile, surroundings, and also demeanor. In that one title, then, can be seen an assimilation of the themes on which I had been working, beginning with "Backgrounds." From there, it was on to "Endangered Species."