By the time he graduated from high school he was creating commissioned murals throughout the New York City area. Johnson pursued his artistic studies at New York University where he graduated in 2000 with a B.A. in Fine Arts. In 2001, Johnson began showcasing his work at various bars, nightclubs and cultural outposts throughout the Lower East Side and East Village of Manhattan. Unsatisfied with the physical and creative confines of traditional art galleries, Johnson continued to create street art throughout the city, posting his work and philosophical musings on street poles, walls, parking signs and sidewalks.
These explosions of color and imagery can be described as urban surrealism: a melting pot of style and art movements. His paintings draw influence from pop culture, comic book art, the streets, cartoons, tattoos and skateboard style graphics, as well as traditional and non-traditional art movements such as abstract and neo-expressionism, op-art, graffiti and surrealism.
In addition to painting on canvas, metal, plastic, and Plexiglas, Johnson has remained true to his early beginnings in recent years by completing commissioned paintings and murals inside of nightclubs such as Quo, Pink Elephant, NA, Plumm, Eleven, Go-Go, Retox, and Webster Hall. He has completed murals for Design Within Reach, The Surf Lodge in Montauk, and the U.S. OPEN in Queens.
Johnson’s work has been displayed in such galleries as Mark Murray Fine Arts, Factory Fresh, Bent, Sotheby’s, Half Gallery, and The New Museum. Press features and favorable reviews have appeared in such publications as Gotham Magazine, Radar, Zink, SOS, Hampton’s Magazine, The City Review, The Daily News, Forbes Magazine, The New York Post, The New York Observer and The New York Times. His work is in the permanent collection of the Patterson, Hamilton, and Chelsea Art Museums.
"The flowers represent the beauty and fragility of life, i wanted to make something seen as beautiful and turn it into something dangerous, the flowers almost look like weapons with sharp leaves and radiant energy. The type of flowers that could only grow and survive growing through cracks in the city pavement, through adversity they bloom.
The series on the whole will be paintings created from drawings from the left for dead and gutter bravado series, touching on life experiences, in an auto biographically way chock full of symbolism and iconography. The work is a combo of comic book art, tattoo art, street art, graffiti, cartoon, and abstract woven into a complex world of urban surrealism. "
