dArt International Magazine

by Roy Bernardi and Jennifer Leskiw

Recently, we went to see the exhibition of Rae Johnson’s work at the Christopher Cutts Gallery on Morrow Avenue in downtown Toronto. Several large-scale landscape paintings were shown among smaller more intimate landscapes. Johnson, born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, studied at the New School of Art in Toronto from 1975 to 1976 and continued her education at the Ontario College of Art from 1977 to 1980. As a distinguished female Canadian artist, she lived and created art in Toronto during the 1980s before relocating to Flesherton, Ontario, in 1987. She stated that Robert Markle, one of her educators, was her most significant influence. She passed away in 2020. The opening event was attended by Rae Johnson’s children, Adrian, Joslyn and June.

Her artistic expression captures the diverse experiences of life in her immediate surroundings. Her artwork ranges from representations of demons and ethereal beings in the snow, to angelic figures, scenes of indulgence, intimate moments in bathtubs, depictions of societal outcasts, inebriated individuals, saintly figures, and verdant landscapes reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. Her creations explore the intersection of the sacred and the profane. She often portrayed her studio or living space, utilizing friends and her children as subjects.

We sat down with her daughter Joslyn Rogers who works in the entertainment industry as an Actor/Writer/Director for a candid interview.

What was life like as the child of an artist?

I was raised in a creative environment.  I had the privilege of being the child of two talented individuals.  My mother Rae Johnson was a gifted visual artist. My father, Clarke Rogers, was the artistic director from 1982-1987 of Theatre Passe Muraille, a Canadian alternative theatre company that champions independent and experimental performances.  

I remember playing in my mother’s various studios. She would be painting into the night, listening to Nirvana or Jimi Hendrix, and I would be finger painting beside her. I remember falling asleep to the clickety-clack of my father’s typewriter, and playing backstage at his rehearsals. When I was a baby we were in-between apartments so we slept on the set of ‘Jessica’, a play by Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell. My father was directing the play and my mother painted the poster for it. 

We moved out of Toronto in the late 1980s and bought a country property in Flesherton, Ontario. We had acres of forest around us and a pond which became the muse for mother’s paintings over the next decade. Flesherton was an artist community so most of my friends were children of artists, like the daughters of painter Harold Klunder and sculptor performance artist Catherine Carmichael. Regardless of where we lived, our living rooms always transformed into my mother’s creative workspace. We frequently attended art shows alongside her eclectic circle of friends, including her close companions and fellow artists Tom Dean, Sybil Goldstein and Lorne Wagman. 

My sister, brother, and I were often left to our own devices, and would play from morning until night out in the sprawling woods surrounding our house. We became very attuned to nature, to the spirits of the forest, and were given the freedom to explore the imaginary worlds we would create in play.

After the death of my father, my family moved back to Toronto. It’s only now as an adult that I can truly appreciate the clan I grew up with and belong to, and that when I declared to my mother as a little girl that I wanted to be an actress, I was met with encouragement and not “get a real job”.

My mother, Rae, was an integral part of the Toronto arts community during the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this time, a collective emerged, ChromaZone, a vibrant creative group dedicated to reintroducing figurative painting to Toronto, featuring notable figures such as Brian Burnett, Oliver Girling, Andy Fabo, Sybil Goldstein and Tony Wilson. My mother was also an associate professor at OCADU. It’s stunning how influential she was.  

Tell us what you know about your mother’s relationship with Brian Burnett? 

Brian and my mother met at The New School of Art in Toronto as students. They quickly fell in love and had my brother Adrian. My mother told me about being poor students with a babe in arms, living in artist warehouses, and the “art wars” between them – spending nights trying to out-paint one another. Tom Dean remembers visiting Rae and Brian at their illegal apartment on Niagara street, which they had converted mostly into their studio with floor to ceiling paintings and a giant mound of dirty baby diapers in the centre of it all. Brian and Rae were budding artists together. They played in experimental art bands, one called Niagara, and another called DogSound, with other local Queen West visual artists like Micheal Merrill, Alan Glicksman, Lorne Wagman, and Derek Caines. They were ambitious, hot young art stars, and found their artistic voices together. They had the best art dealers in town: Brian was with Av Issacs, and Rae with Carmen Lamanna. I can see how they influenced each other in their respective paintings which share surrealist, dream-like qualities. Sometimes I can even see representations of each other in their work.

They broke up in the mid 80s after nearly a decade together. It was devastating to my mother, who nearly had a mental breakdown but, that led to some of her most powerful paintings which now belong to permanent collections throughout Canada.

What do you recall about Rae’s art work?

When I think of my mother’s work, I recall my own life. When we were living in Florence, she was working on a series titled “Bambino Miracolo”, which was exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Rome, Italy. They were large scale oil paintings inspired by the horrific images coming out of the Bosnian war at the time. Embedded in the painted scenes were dying babies attached to intrusive medical devices and renaissance angels guarding over top. 

My life has been chronicled through my mother’s paintings. She painted our property in Flesherton, every season, every time of day. She painted portraits of her friends, every studio she inhabited, the storms and sunsets over Lake Winnipeg where our family cottage was, and she painted us, her children. I appear in her paintings at every stage of my life: as a baby, a young girl, and even as an adult. One of the most inspiring qualities about my mother was that she always painted. My father committed suicide by hanging in our Flesherton forest in 1996. From that came a body of work she called “The Black and White Series” and “The Premonition Drawings”. Like the titles suggest, they are black and white, often interiors of her bedroom with ghostly figures lurking in the shadows.

Did Rae favour figurative work over landscape painting?

My mother didn’t start painting landscapes until the late 1980’s after moving to Flesherton. She said she began in secret, afraid the new subject matter would be perceived as an affront to her well established style of “urban nightmares.” To her, this transition to painting nature was her most daring work. She also proclaimed that painting the sunsets over our Flesherton Pond was where she learned how to paint light. My mother’s paintings have a narrative spirit, and she would alternate between figurative and landscape for the rest of her life, each reflecting her inner soul. 

I believe that good artists are visionaries, often unacknowledged or misunderstood in their own time. After taking on her artistic estate, I have been working alongside the new generation of curators and artists. They seem to understand and appreciate my mother’s work and that of her contemporaries. My mother was ahead of her time, waiting to be rediscovered. 

by Roy Bernardi

John Scott was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, in 1950 and died at the age of 72 in 2022. He was raised in the Cold War era that concerned itself with the imminent threat of nuclear conflict.

A Canadian multimedia artist, Scott, was known for his drawings, paintings and sculpture/installations. His artistic creations have drawn comparisons to those of American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), who similarly explored themes of mortality, destruction, and the disparity between wealth and poverty. In the wake of Basquiat’s passing and his rise to fame, Scott has been dubbed the “Basquiat of Canada.” It is important to note that Scott, being ten years Basquiat’s senior, had already established his artistic identity well before Basquiat’s initial creations.

Renowned for his compulsive mark-making and ironic wit, Scott was a visionary in the art world. He was a long-standing professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, challenging and inspiring his students to develop their individual creative styles and express their innermost thoughts and emotions through their art. Scott was an influential artist within the Toronto art community from the early 1980 until his death through his iconic, political and accessible work. 

Scott’s paintings and sculptures addressed themes of war, industrialization, authority, social class, and fear. For example, he portrayed fighter planes hovering over a blackened earth, cities detached and cast adrift in space, and strange genetic modifications of life. He depicted scenes of political devastation through representations of “twisters” with evil faces, drones, endless tanks whose purpose is surveillance. His many humanlike figures have large bunny-like ears which portray their vulnerability and sensitivity to larger forces.

Scott lived in a large messy studio in the urban core. He regarded people that he encountered with kindness and generosity, whether they were homeless or affluent, students or scholars. He lived out his belief that art should be accessible by gifting everyone who came into his space with a personalized drawing, and his artwork is ubiquitous in the homes of the many people who knew him. His work was also accessible in another way: while the subject matter may be complex, and the readings layered, regardless of their knowledge of art, the audience easily “got” his work. Nowhere is this accessibility better evidenced than in his work, owned by the National Gallery of Canada, titled “Apocalypse Trans-Am.” This installation of a 1981 Trans-Am car covered in black paint with the Book of Revelations scratched into the surface was lauded as one of the most popular works in the gallery’s collection.

Historically, Scott successfully positioned himself as a prominent artist within the art community, as evidenced by his inclusion in art history texts, museum retrospectives, and various collections and exhibitions. He became the first recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2000. 

Scott’s oeuvre is characterized by a range of pivotal themes, such as “100 Workers, Carnivore, Teddy-Bear, The Bunny-man, The Dark Commander, Trans-am Apocalypse, Jet Fighters, Watch Towers, Tanks, and culminating in the “Night Sky” imagery, which he produced subconsciously, aware that his time was drawing to a close.

“Fallen Angel, “words written on paper by Scott featured in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection’s exhibition Fire Storm, serves as a profound reflection of John Scott’s personal interpretation of his existence within the world. This exhibition presents a diverse array of his works, spanning from his early career to 2015. Among the highlights are a small plastic maquette for “Trans-Am Apocalypse,” created in 1987, which includes incised text, and “The Conqueror Worm,” a sculpture from 1997 constructed from sheet metal, rubber tires, electronic components, paint, and a metal frame. Currently Scott’s work can be viewed at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection; John Scott: Fire Storm exhibition from December 7, 2024 to May 11, 2025.

John Scott works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as well as every major museum throughout Canada from the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, The Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, to the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia.