Dancing in Firelight

Artist: Morgan Johnson

Format: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 15" × 30"

Description:

Dancing In Firelight reveals itself from the ground up. The lower portion of this wide horizontal canvas pulses with long, slender Fractionalist cells in deep gold, amber, and red — forms that read first as flames, tendrils of heat rising and bending the way fire does, undulant and alive. Follow those cells upward and something shifts: the tendrils become limbs, the flames become figures, and what began as an investigation of light becomes an entire gathering of people in motion. They are dancing — loosely, tribally, with the particular abandon that only exists after dark, around a fire, when the usual rules of comportment have quietly dissolved. From the Light Series, Johnson notes that "light at night can elicit curiosity, caution, odd behaviors or mood changes depending on its source" — and firelight in particular has always done something to human beings that daylight doesn't. It loosens them. The colors here know that: the warmth is not decorative but atmospheric, suffusing the entire canvas with the feeling of heat on skin and music you can't quite hear but feel moving through you. The painting doesn't depict a fire. It generates one.

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