Broken Fall

Artist: Morgan Johnson

Format: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 30" × 24"

Description:

The birch trunks in Broken Fall are the only vertical constants — pale, spare, rising through a canvas consumed by crimson and amber. Everything else is in the process of letting go. Morgan Johnson renders the fall foliage in his most regimented Fractionalist grid in this selection: the cells are diamond-shaped, uniform, locked into a repeating pattern that covers the canvas from the scattered leaves on the forest floor to the last clinging color in the upper canopy. And that is the paradox the painting holds. Falling leaves are among the most ungovernable of natural events — each one released by its own timetable, carried by wind that answers to nothing. Yet here they are, held inside a structure as ordered as a quilt. From the Guided Series, Johnson supposes "landmarks in a forested situation, where a change of seasons could alter understanding or the path." The forest you navigate by in summer is not the forest you find in October. What looks like chaos is actually inevitability — and Johnson's insistence on structure is not a denial of that wildness, but a reminder that the falling was always going to happen, on exactly this schedule, whether we were ready or not.

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