Original artwork by Johanna St. Clair

2018

Ink on paper

19 x 24"

In her early work, St. Clair painted intricate, detailed oil on panel renderings of atmospheric chaos: dots, trees, tangled branches, dense foliage. Shifting away from this in favor of more immediate, looser renderings, the artist’s idea is to capture a direct line to some fundamental aspect of the way the world is organized and to do it with greater freedom and less fuss. St. Clair distills the gestures down to the essence of the subject, creating images that draw you in with their understated yet expressive beauty.

"I have the feeling that the ink and brush, with their wild fluidity, are conduits to a fundamental current that runs through the subjects. But there is some blurring because I can’t tell if the current that I find is in the subject or in me - perhaps it’s the common thread that runs through both. The works look outward to the world, and also turn inward to the experience of being in the world: the upsurge of consciousness, of perception, that orients us in the world."


Johanna St. Clair lives and works in San Francisco. Along with her husband, John McCambridge, she co-founded ​Mollusk Surf Shop​ which has developed into a cultural institution that integrates surfing, art, craft, music, and film.​ Mollusk has brick and mortar stores in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood, Santa Barbara, and Venice Beach, and a clothing line which is widely distributed. A few years after starting the business, Johanna returned to making art. ​First with drawings from observation on small, blank cards (she keeps a pocket-studio with her at all times), then with her larger-scale ink and brush paintings on paper, and recently with paintings in oil, Johanna's work has grown more direct, fluid, and urgent.​ Her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, and at the Tucson Desert Art Museum.