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Cheryl Johnson-Managing Creativity

Cheryl Johnson is a Fine Art—Abstract Expressionist painter. She has been gifted with renowned artistic talent. Johnson primarily works in oil and mixed media. Her work has transitioned from being a noted portrait and realist painter to her current Abstract focus. She is also an accomplished sculptor and photographer. Her work is exhibited in corporations, galleries and personal collections across America, Canada, and Europe.

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Missing

I miss Rosie and Ruby and Maggie and the secret forest, My heart crystal lonely.

Cheryl Johnson: Kauai and North Carolina. A contemporary and impressionist painter focusing on a unique style of Abstract Expression that is often likened to Impressionism.

Cheryl Johnson's work is known for painting large, light-filled abstractions. She creatively uses brushes and the palette knife as her primary chosen form of expression. Applying layers and skeins of bright colors. Her work is infused with energy and paint often intertwines becoming a tangle of pale pink, scarlet, mustard, sienna, yellow ochre and black or deep hues. Lines move and suggest that this ganglion of pigments evokes the nerves or arteries of a secret forest or forgotten city.

Contemporary – abstract landscape paintings

sampleCheryl Johnson is an American abstract expressionist painter.  Her works are exhibited extensively and are collected worldwide. Cheryl lives and works in Kauai, Hawaii.  Her current works show a deep involvement with the expressive impact of color and texture. This latest piece is the first painting in a series of oil and mixed media works that explore the theme of a “Secret Forest.”  This series attempts to depict the every changing and evolving landscape and the passage of time. “Abstract art to me is a visual language of form, color and line which allows me to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from actual real visual references in the world. When I am creating a painting I'm not attempting to re-create reality. I want the viewer to experience the feelings I felt in a place and time.” 

“My abstract landscape paintings are inspired by my walks with my dogs in a forest near my home in the Carolina’s or when I “wog;” (walk and jog) up Power House road in Kauai with my partner. They are more an expression of the emotion I feel in a specific moment. I am inspired by the place and then the spaces, the color and the texture of the natural world. I strive to capture an essence and bring a feeling onto the canvas. I enjoy exploring color, forms, and texture. Perhaps in addition to being an abstract painter I am perhaps a explorer of fauvism where as I work with color it is conspicuously and deliberately altered. By using the palette knife my forms are often following cubism, and I blatantly alter the forms of how real life entities are depicted. For me, color creates both form and line. Color and light dictates the direction in which a painting will go.”

Johnson works deliberately.I paint and then I step back and ponder, she said. Then I add more elements and sit and look at the painting, sometimes for hours. Eventually, the painting tells me what to do next. If I like to stop and simply rest, breathe and look it is then I know it is time to stop and I have succeeded.When not painting or creating combines, collages or mixed media on multiple surfaces from canvas, to wood, to metal Cheryl can be found molding, cutting, scraping, and building unique forms as her sculptures take form.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Creating art is my lifes passion and isn't life simply beautiful.
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Forer effect

Forer effect


 Time passes and we grow and learn and continue to be ourselves. I pray my best self.  For the past month while caring for my partner who clings desparetely to life. During this time I have stolen moments to paint.  A dragonfly landed on my work. One of her wings was caught in the varnish. She somehow managed to keep flying, but left her wing to remind me. Keep flying no matter what.

 Work in progress: 
This article is from: http://skepdic.com/forer.html

The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people.
Psychologist Bertram R. Forer (1914-2000) found that people tend to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realizing that the same description could be applied to just about anyone. Consider the following as if it were given to you as an evaluation of your personality.
You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.






Go see my art: 

Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student the above evaluation. He asked them to evaluate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good." The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2 out of 5, or 84% accurate.

In short, Forer convinced people he could successfully read their character. His accuracy amazed his subjects, though his personality analysis was taken from a newsstand astrology column and was presented to people without regard to their sun sign. The Forer effect seems to explain, in part at least, why so many people think that pseudosciences "work". Astrology, astrotherapy, biorhythms, cartomancy, chiromancy, the enneagram, fortune telling, graphology, rumpology, etc., seem to work because they seem to provide accurate personality analyses. Scientific studies of these pseudosciences demonstrate that they are not valid personality assessment tools, yet each has many satisfied customers who are convinced they are accurate.
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From tai ho's blog lessons from a painter

Here are four key lessons I learned from  Lim Tze Peng.  http://woontaiho.blogspot.com



Lesson 1: Value the kind and generous – In the early years, Tze Peng, a self-taught artist, took part in group exhibitions to ride on better-known names.  In one show, organised by the famed artist Lee Man Fong, he didn’t sell any works.  One the last day, Man Fong told him one of his paintings had sold and gave him $300.  “It was a lot of money at that time and God knows I needed it.”  A year later, he visited Man Fong’s home and saw his painting there.  He paused and looked up at me.  “Lee Man Fong is a good man,” was all he said.

Lesson 2: Believe in yourself – Tze Peng once reluctantly submitted a painting he had done on a trip to Bali as one of 20 local works Singapore would be sending for a competition in England.  The Singapore authorities rejected it.  They found it “neither Eastern nor Western”; it did not conform to any artistic tradition.  Well known artist Cheong Soo Pieng fought hard for it to be included, asking the authorities to give the new artist a chance.  The piece eventually made its way to England together with the other paintings.  One morning about three weeks later, a doctor friend of Tze Peng called.  He said he had heard on the BBC the night before that a Singaporean artist who painted Bali had won a special prize in England.  Tze Peng rushed to the nearest newspaper stand, and there it was, a small article with his name wrongly translated.  But there was no mistaking it, Lim Tze Peng had won his first international award.  “They did not know who I was, did not care if it was Eastern or Western.  They saw my talent…what has not been accepted as tradition, what was considered neither East nor West, is now my hallmark.”

Lesson 3: Be true to yourself – Commissioned by a Japanese collector to do a painting of a plum – for a considerable fee – Tze Peng tried and tried but was not satisfied with the results and gave up in the end.  He passed the job on to an artist friend who did the work and got the money.  “He bought me coffee.  He was happy and so was I.  I will not sell something that I think is not good.”

Lesson 4: Perseverance will be rewarded – A painter all his life, Tze Peng won recognition only in his 70s and was conferred the Cultural Medallion, the highest artistic honour, at 83.  But he was not bitter.  Two years ago, he became the first Singaporean artist to exhibit his works at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, his life-long dream.
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Stream of conscious thought

Life sometimes get so busy that we forget to take time to breath. Then our bodies remind us that we are tired because you begin hurting somewhere. Usually it is a backache or a headache. Often you are Today I am so tired I have trouble moving easily. It is time to take a break, go for a walk or the beach.

Ah, better now. breathing.
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I think of myself as a an artist- painter, sculpture, photographer.

I long for feelings to be creative. When I begin creating my tension dissipates. The process is often labour intensive, however, I do want labour to be invisible. I want my work to have emotional intelligence and become visual poetry.  All of life is like playing with building blocks, adding, stacking, removing, sometimes falling, then building higher and higher...random shapes become forms and objects. Geometric melts into curves. As a visual artist I communicate through the materials I choose.
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Woman artists

Women artists

How wonderful to be a woman artist and learn from and admire female great abstract expressionists.
My work is just starting to flow and move more freely to color and movement and planes of color and shape. I love to peruse great works of art and women artists are on top of my list. I have so many favorites and never tire from looking at their work.
At the beginning of her career Frankenthaler was categorized as an abstract expressionist painter yet in 1960 the term Color Field painting was used to describe her work. Helen Frankenthaler, the lyrically abstract painter whose technique of staining pigment into raw canvas helped shape an influential art movement in the mid-20th century and who became one of the most admired artists of her generation died this year at 83. What a full and marvelous career. This style was characterized by large areas of a more or less flat single color which I love so much. There is “no formula,” she said in an interview in The New York Times in 2003. “There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.”
Her work to me moved Abstract Expressionism into a new world of Minimalists.
I love to look at these great artists work and then just let it all go and paint freely having been given permission by these wonderful artists who simply let their feelings flow. I aspire to work so expressively.
Joan Mitchell an abstract expressionist composes with long curvilinear strokes or broad stains of color, that move and bend and make a bold statement for women artists. Did you know In 1959 Mitchell moved to France, settling first in Paris where she maintained a studio for nine years. In 1968 she made her home near the town of Vethuel in Monet country, about thirty-five miles northwest of Paris. Her studio and home were in a home that Monet had lived in from April 1878 to November 1881. Perhaps France will be my next stop.
Frida Kahlo. Considered one of Mexico’s greatest artists, Frida Kahlo began painting after she was severely injured in a bus accident. How amazing to create such poignant works from bed. Powerful. I enjoy studying her compositions and marvel at her imagery.
Alice Neel
Alice Neel, I love her paintings of women unusually angular. Alice Neel was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century. She was also a pioneer among women artists. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Neel was never fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements. Sympathetic to the expressionist spirit of northern Europe and Scandinavia and to the darker arts of Spanish painting, she painted in a style and with an approach distinctively her own.
Louise Nevelson became renowned during the Abstract Expressionist period for constructing crated assemblages full of wooden items grouped together into monochromatically painted cubic structures. She worked with found objects imbued with a spiritual life that was informed by feminist ideals and Nevelson’s strong persona, which inspired multitudinous female artists associated with the women’s movement. Influenced by Duchamp’s found object sculptures, Nevelson sought to build abstract wooden environments, painted gold, black, or white. The narratives in her artwork originated from her personal migration history as a Jewish woman who relocated to America, and from her active life in New York’s artistic community.
Georgia O’Keeffe made large-format paintings of enlarged blossoms, presenting them close up as if seen through a magnifying lens, and New York buildings, most of which date from the same decade. Beginning in 1929, when she first began working part of the year in Northern New Mexico—which she made her permanent home in 1949—O’Keeffe depicted subjects specific to that area, bold, large, moving.
I have so much to learn and learning from these great ladies is so exciting.
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And now after learning, studying and being inspired I am letting it flow.
at Breathe, look up, look out. Inhale, exhale.  Draw the energy from the day into the core of your being and let go of the angst, the stress.

 Creativity is the ability to create new things in your life. For example, you could create new ideas, be inspired, have a vision and create that vision.


Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
— Pablo Picasso
at Today I asked my higher Self to guide me to the one I should be thinking, reading, saying and I remembered the undeniable truth of the power of your thoughts and words. I have awakened my consciousness to a level where I take care to speak good words, be mindful of good thoughts and catch my self when I deviate. This simple practice has already changed my days in ways I would have never imagined. I love to learn. Did you know water at freezing level forms snowflakes? The crystals formed are like beautiful perfect snowflakes. Another observation; any snowflake you look at under microscope, is a hexagon. The famous six pointed star, The star of David; the seal of Solomon... did Solomon have knowledge of a secret we don't - or perhaps have forgotten? Interesting read.