The Artist

Canadian, have lived in Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and now the UK. I was a graphic designer for 15 years. I have been learning how to paint with oil for the past 5 years. 

 

My husband thinks I need a longer bio so he had a go:

 

CC Johnstone is a Canadian painter and recovering nomad. She has developed an inconvenient habit of living in interesting places. Each city left something behind: its colour, its noise, its peculiarities, its ghosts.

 

CC became fascinated by the way places change when you stay long enough to stop being a tourist but never quite become a local. Neon reflected in puddles. Back streets at 3am. Half-empty cafés. Brutalist buildings. Tropical storms. Old women watching the world from balconies. Men smoking outside restaurants. The curious loneliness of cities.

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CC's work lives somewhere between memory and now. Her paintings are less interested in faithfully recording a scene then asking what the scene felt like. Ordinary objects acquire suspicious levels of importance. A doorway might suggest an escape route. A figure in the distance might suggest a person you once knew. An innocent landscape may contain the faint sense that something has just happened.

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CC paints with the accumulated visual debris of a life spent on the move: Canadian Fall, London ran, Hong Kong reflections and the soothing light of The Cotswolds. The result is work that can feel simultaneously familiar and unknown.

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