Light Under Water

Artist: Morgan Johnson

Format: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 28" × 22"

Description:

Light Under Water takes a moment to locate you. The first reading is familiar enough — flowing water, eddies and swells, the kind of creek surface that catches light in shifting yellow-green and blue-white ribbons while something organic moves at the edges, a branch perhaps, a reflection of sky. The eye moves across the surface looking for a fixed point and finds none. Johnson's forms curl and billow without resolving, and just when the composition seems about to settle into something recognizable, it releases you back into motion. From the Light Series — Johnson's investigation into how light defines the world and interacts with our selves — he describes "how light enters yet reflects upon water in constant motion." Then the reorientation arrives. You are not looking at the surface of the water from above. You are at the bottom of the stream, looking up through the current toward the sky. The deep violet and brown at the top of the canvas is not the bank — it is the world above the waterline, seen from below, filtered through everything between you and it. Once you find that perspective, the painting becomes something else entirely: not a study of water, but the experience of being held inside it.

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