Featured Artist Johnny Karwan

Johnny Karwan meshes pattern, design, and a love of nature into hand cut and painted wood assemblage. View more from this artist by visiting his website.

 

 

I operate a multidisciplinary art and design studio, art factory, detritus rescue, benevolent society and good ideas association from a 1904 Edwardian in the historic Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, California.

 

 

My studio is full of an assortment of projects in varying degrees of evolution. I surround myself with collections of things that inspire me like art, books, objects and oddments.

 

 

After graduating with a degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, I was introduced to the world of animation as a background scene painter and hit the road traveling as an itinerant artist. For a decade I traveled and taught painting techniques for numerous movie and television productions in film and animation studios worldwide.

 

 

Following years of travel, I began working with international architects, interior designers and public art commissions creating specialty finishes, murals, wood sculptures and site-specific artworks for corporate, public and residential clients.

 

 

Hand-painted art and designs reflecting my love for nature, pattern, nostalgia and the exotic have been created for major brands for use on textiles, apparel, home accessories, and a wide variety of products.

 

 

Aside from traditional representational painting, I love to create wood pieces cut out from birch plywood and painted in multi-layered transparent acrylics. Sometimes the grain of the wood shows through the transparent layers of paint, making its own statement in revealing its natural origins from tree to painted surface.

 

 

Some pieces are trompe l’oeil translations of elements of the natural world. Sticks and twigs become birds and bugs. Wood scraps become a spider, swan or leaping marlin. Other pieces are inspired by the concept of symbols being the “psychological mechanism for transforming energy.”

 

 

These cutouts are a visual representation of enhancing and giving new context to ordinary images of natural elements or unusual objects, or items that are past their prime or have otherwise outlived their usefulness. Sometimes a mash up of both! I follow whatever inspirations steer me in a direction of creative flow.

 

 

Though having worked primarily in the realm of commercial and commissioned work, I’ve also exhibited paintings and assemblages in group shows curated by Christopher Brown, Misch Kohn, Richard Shaw, Henry Hopkins, Rolando Castellon, Inez Storer and George Herms. I also occasionally travel the western states exhibiting and selling at art festivals from California to Texas.

 

 

With a wink at the future and a nod to the past, I am inspired in the present.

 

Artist Johnny Karwan invites you to follow him on Instagram.

 

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