Andrew Johnson

I began to paint after I retired from the Civil Service in 1993 after a long career in HM Customs & Excise.

Central to my practice is the depiction of warfare, the imagery drawn mainly from media cuttings and from films. Much of this imagery maps out a world of simulation and death without moral judgement. The ‘Helicopter Series’ 2009, is a body of work drawn from a long helicopter sequence in the Ridley Scott film ‘Black Hawk Down’ ( 2001), based on a factual incident where a US relief force went into Mogadishu, to rescue fellow Americans held by Somali insurgents in 1993 . The images display the power of spectacle and can best be described by the the words of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard; ‘we all know the images before we see them’. They belong to a genre of war spectaculars which serve to blur the perception of what is reality.

Why do I choose to paint war images which, to quote the painter Marlene Dumas, ‘are suspect in the first place and by the process of painting become even more suspect’? I choose to paint them for that very reason. To further distance the image from reality, I use the the methods of the photo-realists in gridding the canvas and painting each square independently; a technique which destabilizes the apparent unity of the image.

In my practice I am drawing my images from a motion movie, and I see the helicopter sequence there as a performance space and the sequential images I am painting as dynamic events for which there can be no closure. I am organizing events in time in the same way that governments and the media organize military spectacle. To quote Hal Foster, ‘a history first scripted, then translated into pseudo-historical simulations to be consumed’.