Brett Allen Johnson’s first fascination of the West stemmed from childhood visits to northern Arizona to visit family in Sedona.  These trips would take the Johnson family from Northern Utah through iconic western landscapes like Mt. Carmel, Kanab, Page, and Vermilion cliffs.  Johnson’s Grandmother, a watercolorist, would take her grandkids on outdoor adventures to explore and paint scenes of the surrounding landscape.  These early experiences would ultimately lead to the artist's journey into recreating the desert on his own canvases.  

The road to a professional artist career was not as straight as you might think.  After graduating and marrying his high school sweetheart, Johnson took on a successful career working with his hands - but this time as a carpenter.  Johnson’s sought after ability to craft beautiful homes lead him to work on some of the most expansive homes in Utah.  Him and his wife, Tosha, started a family and Johnson worked to support them for 16 years.  In this time Johnson learned he had the ability to visualize an idea and then bring that to conception and beyond.  

After a three year stint at art school, which focused mainly on graphic design, he realized he wanted to be a different kind of artist and left school to pursue art in his own way.

Over the course of the next decade, Johnson would hone his craft, and his voice as an artist, through his experiences painting the Southwest, like his grandmother before him. Once in the studio Johnson’s paintings skewed toward expressionism, modernism and abstraction—more Rothko and Motherwell than Russell and Remington. He started filtering his subjects through this unique lens—hard edges, complex forms and vivid colors. In 2011 he would visit the Wide-Open Spaces exhibition at the BYU Museum of Art, and everything started to click into place after he discovered the work of Maynard Dixon and the members of the Taos Society of Artists. The West, he learned, could be as modern as he wanted, and nothing was going to hold him back.

A few years later, Maxwell Alexander Gallery was lucky enough to come across Johnson’s work online — and we were instantly drawn to it.   Since 2016, Johnson has appeared in various group shows and showcase type solo exhibitions.  This month we are excited to present Johnson’s largest and most complete solo exhibition, “Where the Land is Big.”  This group of paintings developed after the artist realized his love for not just the land but for those that work the land.  Throughout the last year, he's had to opportunity to visit and become friends with working cowboys. Johnson states that he fell in love with the extraordinary way their lives connect with and depend on the land.  “I'm really excited about painting the figure right now. Of course, the show is still mostly landscapes. But all but one do so in a way that relates to the people in them. They rarely feel complete to me without it anymore.”

Where the Land is Big opens online October 10th.