NYMPHAEA NYMPHAEA : Anna Johnson

Anna Johnson is a writer of forty years experience that came late to painting. Her art writing has been featured in Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Sydney Morning Herald and as a senior writer for Artist Profile. The third generation daughter of a large family of artists began her earliest work with watercolours, expanding to increasingly large scale paintings from 2018 to the present. Johnson has held three Sydney solo shows and presents her first New York exhibition with Kutlesa Gallery, Chelsea in March 2026. A finalist in this year’s Paddington Art prize, Johnson describes the many Australian artists she had written about as : “My collective art school.” All works presented in “Nymphaea Nymphaea” were made exclusively for NERAM as a site specific creative project

Few associate the master of Post Impressionism with minimal abstraction. In history, Claude Monet in particular is lodged inside the most lyrical branch of landscape. His vast studies of trees, clouds and waterlilies reflected in fathomless bodies of water present a romantic, hyper-decorative idyll far removed from the industrial world beyond his garden walls in Giverny.

Yet a key fact, perhaps forgotten, is that Monet’s large scale Nymphaea murals were donated to France as a symbol of peace, celebrating the Armistice after world war one. In them, the regenerative power of ecology pushes up and out of dark pools and shadows. Gestural and abstracted, these were not sentimental works that grieved the 19th century. I think instead that they subtly (and boldly) faced their time. The ambiguity of surface ornament and pockets of darkness in his late works serve as both evocative and ambiguous.  A century after the final Nymphaea was painted, I feel the dynamic contradiction embedded in Monet’s turbulent and explorative beauty remains vital.  If these works were simply relaxing and re-assuring they would not be quite so magnetic. Violet, after all, is the fusion of red and blue, flame and sky.

Many feel that abstract painting is a genre without a subject. But when I work I do not press mute. Recently and globally, wide spread censorship has forced many artists to resort to euphemisms. My paintings are openly about war and peace, vulnerability and sanctuary. When I painted “Blood Cloud” there was nothing metaphoric about my palette. This work is about blood. The blue “Mythology & Muse”3 series is a quartet with an aqueous nocturnal palette. It is my homage to the water lilies, but perhaps also a subliminal response the nebulous atmosphere of fear that permeates the news cycle like a pending cloud. In the process of completing this show for NERAM, I found both release and respite. Compositionally many of my paintings are hollowed out like caves. In the depths of my raw linen voids,  I seek hiding places, coves and shelter. The project of “Nymphaea Nymphaea” is ongoing. Bridging the meeting point between Post Impressionism and Colour Field painting I found an unbroken thread: the power of colour to heal.