In the News!

One man's trash becomes a Detroit painter's canvas

June 7, 2006

BY NEAL RUBIN

I 'm using one white plastic chair and the artist next door is in the other. It's Jack Johnson's studio, but he's sitting on a bright red Shop-Vac.

"If I keep too many chairs here," he explains, "I won't do any work."

He'll stretch out, or maybe the furniture maker down the hall in the converted office building on East Grand Boulevard will drop by, and all the ideas vibrating inside his closely shaven head won't have any way to escape. He spent too many years not being an artist to waste time now, so if he has to be ascetic to jump-start the aesthetic, he'll make the sacrifice.

There's precious little in his house, either, just a very patient wife named Beulah and a very wide assortment of paints. "Anything that leaves a stain," he says -- tempera, acrylics, oil bars, markers, even beet juice. If it'll slash across a canvas, he'll try it.

Johnson, 52, also likes what artists call "found objects," as in wood scraps, industrial parts and all the other remnants of urban life. He decorated two doors, also foundlings, for an auction Friday to benefit a warehouse full of retread building parts.

A long list of artists donated doors or other works for the Architectural Salvage Warehouse of Detroit. Johnson jumped off the roster as both a personal favorite and the only artist whose originals I ever brought home for $2.12, including tax.

That was last year at a downtown coffee shop, since closed. Across from the cash register were two portraits in a style described variously as "intuitive," "naove" or "graffiti" -- simple faces on a plain background blasted with vibrant colors.

The cashier explained that Johnson had cranked out 1,000 sketches or basic paintings and was selling them for $1 apiece. I didn't know until Tuesday that the sale had a deeper purpose.

Painting a point

The coffee shop had been good to artists, Johnson says, displaying their works when others wouldn't. Taking no money from the sales, he was hoping to help keep it afloat. Also, he was making a statement.

Johnson stands probably 6-foot-2. He's a dark, wide-shouldered veteran with a deep voice and ready supply of eloquence. Any statement he cares to make aloud will be heard, but this was more subtle.

"I did it as a protest," he says. Artists are like shoe salesmen, grousing after work about their customers. Don't these Philistines realize how much time it takes to make things look easy?

"It was a reminder," Johnson says, "that we're not as important as our art is."

The only art lessons he ever took came in kindergarten. Through Chadsey High and 25 years in uniform, his attention was elsewhere. Maybe he'd feel differently without a pension, but as a painter, "if you do it for money and for fame "

The sentence trails off and he shakes his head. "When we're dead and gone, art has to live on."

Ruin no longer

So do cities, which is why he lent a hand to a project called Urban Alchemy: Artifacts Transformation. It's a found objects show (Saturday through June 26) and preview party (6-10 p.m. Friday) at two galleries saved from near ruin, all in support of the salvage warehouse, which keeps pieces of destroyed buildings from winding up in landfills.

See it at the 4731 Gallery, 4731 Grand River Ave., and 555 Gallery, 4884 Grand River Ave. Call (313) 515-0399 for information.

"We have this insatiable desire for 'stuff,' " Johnson says. "Irresponsibly, all that we put back is trash." When he's not painting, he and others like him are patrolling, seeing the potential in discards.

He has as many parts and pieces as you need, he says, waiting in his shed. Just stop by. But forgive him if he doesn't ask you to take a chair and talk awhile.

Neal Rubin appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at (313) 222-1874 or nrubin@detnews.com.

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