Gretta Johnson

Gretta Johnson’s Tin Man’s Dream

By Joey Frank

On her trip to Oz, Dorothy meets the Scarecrow first and then the Tin Man. The Scarecrow opines, if he only had a brain. Next she meets the Tin Man, who wishes he had a heart. To my logical child mind, I remember thinking, well then the Tin Man must have a brain already, but what could that look like? His head seems so empty, maybe a big wad of pink chewing gum stuck to the inside of its tin cranium soaked in motor oil? Gretta Johnson’s paintings in the exhibition at Tappeto Volante, “Tin Man’s Dream” are not literal answers to this question, but they aren’t a surrealistic depiction of dreams either. The lattice worked lines are neural nets, seeming to suggest what a map of these electrical impulses could be, the function of which, to animate the Tin Man with thought.

Gretta wrote about a mood of, “the whole body having been exiled, the parts exhumed from memory’s heap are put into action so that a man can come into being.” The gathering of pieces goes right back to the lyric of the Tin Man, “when a man’s an empty kettle, he should be on his Mettle, and yet I’m torn apart…” In the show’s titular work, Tin Man’s Dream, the lines are stitches, or even weld seams to assemble the vessel for a liquid thought that itself has a network of red lines. In the watercolor painting, Yellow Road (encounters), these neural pathway lines form pixel transitions dripping off into droplets and rivulets. There’s a mysterious children’s book quality, of lines being a spell cast, drawing parts together in movement of the eye across a surface - reuniting what had been banished.

While working on this body of paintings, Gretta has been immersed in Irene Gad’s book about Jung and Tarot. There’s a part of the text that she pointed to where “the corpse of the picture is the residue of the past and represents a man who is no more… cutting off the limbs, dividing them into smaller parts and changing them into the nature which is in stone.” In this way she is interested both in atomization, as a process that actually relates to bricks which can be regrouted into new things.

The art historical precedent that I keep coming back to is the work of Paul Klee, who famously advised taking a line for a walk to see where it goes. A beauty of Gretta’s painting is that movement in and out of spontaneity, alternating between letting a line or color lead the painting and then retaking the lead herself. Klee was also an educator at The Bauhaus school, which sought to integrate approaches in illustration and design into what a “painting” could be. Her journey can also be a mode of abstraction and spontaneity in Johnson’s work.

Johnson’s 2015 book OOLM has no words. The only letters are in the title, which themselves form a face, “OO” eyes, “L” nose, “M” mouth. Where those lush color pencil drawings move the reader through the book, accumulating a whole. Johnson’s new paintings are self-contained, with canvases like In Parts and Field Vision presenting bisected space in a balancing act of rich and sparse. Abstractions also become nerve endings and lit matches, language and blood.

It also seems remiss not to mention one of Gretta Johnson’s other jobs in relation to this body of work, as the label maker and artistic designer for Grimm Artisanal Ales. The Tin Man and the aluminum can, an abstract drawing that goes outside of a can full of liquid. The Tin Man's head is an object that you open and drink the contents into your body. It is a mode of functional art making that can only be seen as another leg to the metaphorical chair of Gretta Johnson’s main work. Gretta’s compositions are certainly rooted in the underground comix movement, but play up this Art Deco blocking with an older Art Nouveau style of “whiplash” lines and sinuous asymmetry.

To return from spirits to spirituality, consider the figure of the funnel as it relates to this body of work. A substance enters the fat end of a funnel and emerges through the narrow spout end. Our faces function as inverse funnels when inhaling, as air comes in through the narrow end and expands inside our bodies. In the lower right corner of the canvas, First Breath, the nest of lines on the disembodied vessel shape glow as veins swollen in a moment of pulmonary function. In this painting, as well as, Time’s Release and Shared Spirit, visualizing an exhalation feels like a synesthetic representation of breath into thought. The golden abstraction that seems to emerge from the shared mouth in Shared Spirit, evokes the theosophical paintings of Hilma af Klint. The movements in Gretta’s work are quiet as they are mysterious and lyrical. Conjured as someone who follows a line with wet paint on a brush, and who reels in the leash when it's time to follow the yellow brick road.

Gretta Johnson (b. 1985) earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This will be her second solo exhibition with Tappeto Volante Projects.