Play Time

Visit Anne Johnstone’s collection of mixed media paintings and masks at the and the first thing that catches your eye is the vibrant color. Next you notice the whimsical images: a ladder, a bird, eyes, a mouth, crazy straw hair. And then the varied textures that her combination of collage, acrylic paint and wax produce.

The result is oddly mesmerizing

Within minutes you are hooked. When you look at one of her creations, you want to look again. And the longer you look, the more you see.

Gaga Gallery owner Julie Brooks offers this insight. Initially, “I see a snapshot of an image and I like it, but at the same time the images are complicated.”

The exhibit, which includes work done over the last ten years, is called “Play Time,” and this title could easily refer to Johnstone’s creative process.

Johnstone, who lives and works in Somerville, says that although “each piece is different the thing that is constant throughout [is that] I seek a degree of play.” Rather than getting an idea ahead of time and then going to work, her way of creating is like “playing in her sandbox” where she has the “freedom to get dirty and play around with my tools.” This process “involves using subconscious or unconscious mind as much as I can.”

Educated at Brown University and UMass Boston, with additional study at the Mass College of Art, the Art Institute and the Museum School, Johnstone has been working in her current style for the last ten years.

The wax component came as something as an accident, but she quickly discovered that its “slippery” nature made it great to paint on, and scraping off and adding the wax back added texture to her work.

Her use of color “is vital. I communicate a lot with color [and] sometimes the first thing I know is I like a certain color.”

Another component is what Johnstone calls gesture, the “movement that happens in a painting--not just what the subject matter is doing but movement of color and how color makes your eyes move from one part of the painting to the other.”

In the small painting “Masked Man,” the blues create an island of the darker hued face, clearly animal, but the expressive eyes, the set of the chin, and even the ears, open and vulnerable, are also human. Whoever or whatever this creature, you feel for him.

The “sensitivity that artists have is in a way absolutely necessary [in order] to empathize with those other than yourself,” comments Johnstone.

She adds about working that when, “I’m really into the painting … I feel more alive than doing anything else.”

And that sense of alertness, of careful attention carries into the work itself so that the pieces draw your gaze back, again and again.

Go see you yourself—you won’t be disappointed.