“When I’m painting, I have this weird feeling, like I’m crawling over the dimensions of the subject,” Claire Johnson says from the passenger seat of my Subaru. We’re on our way to stargaze at Golden Gardens, to stare into the night sky that has inspired many of her paintings. Whether it’s a star-filled twilight, a sprinkle-encrusted donut, or a blazing forest fire, Johnson captures every faint speckle on her subject’s surface like an ant summiting a crumb. She paints beyond what she can see; she paints what she can feel, what she knows is there, what she wishes she could see. “I think about the paintings I want to make all the time,” she tells me. “A scene will haunt me until I paint it.”
I first met Johnson in 2023 during her solo show at SOIL, where she’s been a longtime member. I was completely entranced by her oil paintings of the night sky, which don’t just capture the brightest stars, but the ghosts of stars and the suggestions of nebulae, creating a twinkling multidimensional effect. At the show, I saw Johnson frantically running around the gallery with a bandage wrapped around her left hand. “That was right after the accident,” she tells me, three years later. “I was working on a construction project for a private client after my day job. I was tired. The table saw was turned off, but was still slowly spinning. I glided my hand across it. It did so much damage to my finger that it had to be amputated.” I grip the steering wheel with a full-body cringe. “After that, I had to make a rule,” she tells me, laughing. “No more working after work!”
We arrive at the park just after 10 p.m., not realizing it closes at 10:30 p.m. “We wouldn’t want to trespass or anything!” Johnson says to me with a wink. Using our phones as flashlights, we walk to a park bench facing the water and the big open sky. The night is especially dark, due to the new moon—essential for quality stargazing (the brighter the moon, the lighter the stars). She sets up her supplies: a simple tripod and her phone, which she swipes back and forth on between the camera and Sky Guide, a free app that can identify any star, planet, constellation, or satellite by simply pointing the lens at the sky. Almost immediately, she identifies Taurus above us. “See the little triangle head, and its little horns?” I was skeptical about stargazing within the city limits with no telescope, but as my eyes adjusted, more and more stars revealed themselves.
“Even if I can’t see it, I know what I’m looking at, and that’s important to me,” she tells me as she adjusts the settings on her phone camera. Johnson creates her night sky paintings in a number of ways, including long-exposure phone photos and vivid memories, often using the Sky Guide app to ensure that every fleck of paint is in its proper place. Johnson explains that her sky paintings started with random dots, but quickly became an exact science. “My work is a lot about observation of the world around me,” she says. “Every time I paint something, I need to know how it works.”
Earlier at her studio, Johnson had showed me a painting, which she claims is unfinished but looks flawlessly vivid to me: a wide-open, dark blue sky bending into a baby blue haze. The Milky Way cracks through the center like a door into the sky. Meteors bolt across the canvas, and a Jeep with bright headlights zooms around the corner. “That was a night I stayed up and watched the Perseid showers,” she explains. “I was sitting at my camp when I heard a Jeep coming down the road blasting Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.’ There were a bunch of people in the car singing along at the top of their lungs. I was captivated. After that, the song became kind of a thing for me. I really like that song and what it says. It’s so positive. It’s great for when you’re really down, and there’s a psychopath running things.”
When Johnson revealed to me that she hasn’t had time to paint since last November, my heart literally ached. Since the early 2000s, she has worked as a freelance art preparator, installing shows at the Frye and the National Nordic Museum, as well as constructing pedestals and walls for private clients. She began working independently, hoping that she’d have more time for her own art. But she works more than if she had a regular nine-to-five. “It’s fun, but it’s a lot of work,” says Johnson. “My knees are gone. I can’t really climb ladders anymore. I feel like I’m aging out of this job. I wish I could retire.”
Claire Johnson was raised in Seattle, but moved to the San Francisco Peninsula when she was 8. “God, I hated California so much,” she says. “There were no trees, just sticks.” Since her father was a dispatcher and her mother was a stewardess, Johnson’s family stayed connected to the Pacific Northwest, frequently visiting her father’s airline buddies in the Vancouver, BC, area. “I love looking out windows, especially on planes,” she says with literal stars in her eyes. “I love the way everything gets miniature.” This affinity for zooming in and zooming out has shown up in her paintings for the past five decades.
At a young age, Johnson became fixated with drawing after watching her mother doodle while on the telephone. “My mom was an artist, but they wouldn’t let her go to school in the 1940s,” she tells me. “I think she wanted me to do what she couldn’t.” Johnson’s mother encouraged her creative inclinations with plenty of art books and museum visits. “I became really self-sufficient, entertainment-wise,” she recalls. “All they had to do was sit me down with some pencils, and I would just entertain myself for hours.”
After high school, Johnson moved back to Seattle, where she studied art at the University of Washington for one year. “I was a terrible student,” she says. “I thought I knew everything.” Johnson recalls getting a D on her final project because she didn’t paint it in class. “I entered that same painting in the county fair and won first place!” she says with pride. Johnson got a scholarship to the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where she focused on painting portraits of her friends in the queer community. “I felt the need to show what life was like at that time. I loved seeing what history looked like through paintings of the old masters, so I tried to do my own version of that.”
In 1978, Johnson created a series of paintings from a Halloween party at a gay bar in San Francisco, which she realized, after the fact, captured the “last gasp of innocent hedonism.” A couple of weeks after the party, 918 people were found dead in Jonestown (the notorious cult with roots in the Bay Area). A couple of weeks after that, California’s first openly gay politician, Harvey Milk, was killed, along with San Francisco mayor George Moscone. A few years later, the first cases of HIV/AIDS were reported in California. “That series makes people kind of emotional,” says Johnson. The paintings now reside in the halls of Seattle’s INSCAPE building.
In 1987, she moved back to Seattle, where she lived in an artist cooperative in Pioneer Square’s Washington Shoe Company building. Johnson remembers 1990s Seattle as a playground for artists with co-ops, studios, and installations filling abandoned buildings. “Artists have a way of moving into run-down neighborhoods and revitalizing them,” she says. “But once they were revitalized, we weren’t needed anymore, and the art spaces we built would be replaced with condos.” She sighs. “Anyways, I’m being bitter…”
While living at the co-op, Johnson began working in forestry on the suggestion of her mother, who had read about seasonal tree planting in the newspaper. “She told me that a lot of artists do it because it’s seasonal,” she recalls. “The more trees we planted, the more we got paid. Some people were really fast. On my first day, the foreman said to me, ‘You’re not gonna last the day,’ which made me even more determined.” Johnson recalls the labor-intensive work, which included crawling over piles of brush and lugging around 50-pound tree bags. Later, she joined the fire crew, watching controlled burns of logging residue and doing forest inventory, both of which have become subjects of her paintings.
“I really enjoy knowing what I’m painting,” she tells me as we look up at the stars. “It’s sort of like when I was working in forestry… part of the job was counting and identifying the trees and making notes about the ground cover. Gradually, I could identify everything in the forest. It made the experience of walking in the woods so much better. Learning the stars has made the experience of looking at the night sky so much better.” Johnson plans her annual vacation around the Perseids meteor showers each August, randomly selecting a campsite from a book of Washington campgrounds. “There is a thrill in feeling connected to this really big space out there. It makes me feel connected to the galaxy,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s the motivation, but it’s a side effect.”
“I haven’t talked this much in years!” Johnson tells me as we stumble back to my car in the dark. “I haven’t listened this much in years!” I think to myself. I spent the evening scaling the craters of her mind, life, and interests, with the kind of detail she uses in her paintings. After I dropped her off back at her studio, I drove home with a new connection to the sky, to the stars, and to the artist herself.
