Allen "Hale" Johnson

1937 - 2022

Biography

Hale Johnson had been an established oil landscapist for over four decades. His paintings are of the American Realist tradition, often likened to artist Andrew Wyeth and Eric Sloan.

From his rural home in western Massachusetts, Hale intentionally sought locations for his work that evoked a strong emotional response. Concerned primarily with the history of the land, Hale’s compositions often feature weather beaten barns, boats, and well-used farm equipment. These paintings represent a quiet restrain and delicate sensitivity to detail.

Signature to Johnson’s work was a fascination with texture – particularly that of paint peeling wood and cragged rocks. He smudged, speckled and layered the paint in order to achieve this textural quality, an application process he had developed over the course of his career. Each of Johnson’s paintings balance a precise rendering of surface with areas of loosely brushed strokes. This blending of techniques served to relive the eye from the intensity of his textural detail, providing the relational distances which give the pieces their wonderful feeling of space and depth.

Hale Johnson’s paintings capture the countryside of Western Massachusetts, coastal Maine and Northwestern England.

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