< Back to Directory

Maverick Johnson

Drawing, Painting, Sculpture / Installation, Visual / Media

About the Artist

Maverick Johnson is a 21 year old visual artist specializing in painting, drawing, and sculpture. He is a current student at Maryland Institute College of Art pursuing a BFA in General Fine Art as well as a Master of Arts in Teaching. Maverick's professional areas of interest are art education, gallery installation, and curation. 

Artist's Statement

My work investigates perception of space: the distortion of our physical world and the everyday anomalies that occur. I focus mostly on abandoned spaces absent of humans but present in what we have left behind. This trace of humanity and reference to these spaces touches on our ever-growing society and economy, constantly building spaces and technology only to desert them and leave it to nature to figure out how they exist in the world. Through oil, acrylic, and colored pencil, with occasional sculptural elements, I use layers to fuse the mundane with the bizarre.  My art emphasizes the ironic moments of modernity and how it interacts with the human condition. I integrate themes of absurdity, confusion, and discomfort with colorful compositions and vivid atmospheres. The spaces are real and imagined -- drawing from my personal collection of images and experienced moments. These works combine disparate elements with the illusion of layers and texture to create a disoriented space. Within my paintings there are partially recognizable items but nothing solid enough to ground the viewer to reality.  

Featured Work

Photos

Sit And Wait is an abstract/surrealist mixed media piece of colored pencil and acrylic paint on a hand-built wooden panel. This piece combines the architecture of an abandoned structure along with the images of modernization and faux resemblance of life indicating the rapid development of technology and its destruction to our environment.
Laced With Love and an abstract painting that employs layers, texture, illusion of space, and heavily saturated colors. This piece creates a jumbled and ambiguous narrative through its unique use of shape and the placement of them that resemble familiar objects.
Camoflauged is a painting based on the absurdity and irony of hunting and safety. Hunters typically identify each other by the bright orange they wear so as not to harm one another while hunting. The deer as shown through a trail camera has had its antlers replaced with this fluorescent orange as an ironic moment of "safety" from the hunters as well as them being made up of balloon material, leaving the deer less desired as a trophy and therefore "safe" from being killed. This piece is a commentary on human protection of one another (and the elite at that) whilst not protecting the other life that lives amongst us.
Wishing For Decompression is a personal painting based on the hardships I went through during my ages of 19 and 20. Floating through what feels like a space of unfamiliar nothingness, these "19" and "20" balloons float to their eminent demise of deflation and being stuck. Enforced by the canvas's box-shaped illusion, this piece uses the narrative of being trapped and the fragile nature of balloons once confronted by sharp edged object (representing a difficult experience having to live through).
Exposed is a piece that combines the 3d and 2d nature of exploring decayed infrastructure. Interested in the different layers and types of change the depicted building and space has gone through, this painting includes scratched and battered plywood allowing the underneath to peak through much like the revealed brick in the painted image. The painting in the middle depicts a run down building captured by myself on Ridgely Street in Baltimore City.
This painting explores the illusion of layers and texture. It explores and tests the boundaries of what it means to be in a real or imagined space through abstracting an existing space. Inspired by a photograph of an abandoned house, What Once Was is deconstructed to raw shapes and transparencies. In addition to the abstraction, additional elements such as plants and a fire hydrant are included to create a somewhat familiar environment but abstract enough to not ground the image in reality.

Booking

For commissions, collaborations, and other contact details please reach out using my email mavj452@yahoo.com or message through Instagram @artofmav

Andrea Dixon Assistant Director of Exhibitions at Maryland Institute of Art, Morgan Frailey Gallery Installation Manager at Maryland Institute College of Art, Janet Olney Professor at Maryland Institute College of Art and Towson University.