Clay Johnson was born in Durham North Carolina and studied painting and art history at Duke University. For several years Johnson worked in New York and Connecticut as the studio assistant to American Color Field painter, Robert Natkin. In 1988 Johnson began exhibiting his own work in New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC, in a style influenced by The New York School and Color Field painters. After relocating to Laramie Wyoming in 2014 Johnson’s painting took a shift, evoloving from an all over abstraction to that of multiple horizontal color bands. Essentially non-objective, the recent works nonetheless seem to express the wide open spaces and ever changing light and sky of the Western prairie implying multiple horizons and foregrounds.
