Discovering Places

Andrea Johnson finds inspiration in the places that she experiences every day.

- JOHN O'HERN

The historian and activist Rebecca Solnit writes, It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back...”

Andrea Johnson has given herself to places from Cape Cod to Japan and now lives above the fertile Salinas Valley in California, where she was brought up. Her mother, an abstract painter, was her teacher in junior high. She was hard on me,” she confesses. T excelled under that, but I never thought I’d be an artist. I relate visually to everything and have a strong esire to record it.”

Her routine during the pandemic is simple—a horseback ride or a hike in the morning several times a week and back to the studio where she works from 11:30 a.m. to around 5 p.m. She feeds her horse and then joins her husband for dinner. Chris Winfield is a geometric abstract artist and owner of the Winfield Gallery in nearby Carmel-by-the-Sea. We’re good at critiquing each other,” she says, but we could never share a studio. We have very different sensibilities. I’m very solitary and like peace and quiet. Chris has rock going all the time.”