About the Paintings
Dorothy Churchill-Johnson calls her paintings “Visual Haiku” after the Japanese poetic tradition of observing nature ferociously until substance gives way to spirit. Like haiku, they are meant to represent moments of heightened awareness and existential beauty. By focusing lavish attention on the mundane elevates it to the sublime. Objects become complex in proportion to the attention one pays them.
In her latest work she has used selected natural objects, exaggerated them and isolated them in an otherworldly landscape, thus creating a realm of virtual reality. Looking at the paintings it is difficult to judge, with certainty, the exact special relationships between the background and foreground. The physical perspectives are destabilizing, asking the viewer, in his momentary disorientation, to imagine a world governed by laws other than those we deem universal. The paintings evoke an alternative world, composed of imaginary elements and odd juxtapositions, and a sense of being an isolated consciousness in a beautiful, uninhabited universe which is chillingly indifferent to individuals.
Beauty plays an important role in the work, because beauty is its own excuse for being. But there is also an ecological sub-text implied by the man-made intrusions into nature and the intimation of decay and passage of time. The images can be interpreted as either pre-historic or post-apocalyptic.