| Raymond Jonson was one of the first modernist painters in the Southwest. spiritual in paintings in which line, shape, color, texture, and space are used independently of depicting the natural world. Jonson is one of many American artists who resisted Regionalism and Social Realism between the World Wars.; Jonson grew up in the West in a poor, devoutly Baptist family. He went to Chicago in 1910 to study art and quickly became one of the most outspoken members of the Midwestern avant-garde. He knew Bror J. O. Nordfeldt, Birger Sandzén, Albert Bloch, and Nicholas Roerich and was involved with Cor Ardens and the Chicago Salon des Refusés. He was the artist for Maurice Browne's Chicago Little Theatre and a leader in the simple-stage movement in theater. Jonson moved to New Mexico in 1924 to escape the problems of urban life. He taught at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, where today the Jonson Gallery houses many of his works.; In the 1910s and 1920s Jonson painted portraits and landscapes influenced by Impressionism, Symbolism, and Cubism. Jonson's exposure to modern art, the simple stage movement, and the Western landscape influenced him at this paintings of numerals, alphabet letters, plant forms, colors, skyscrapers, and other subjects in the 1930s. This phase was transitional; Jonson was searching By the late 1930s, Jonson's work became totally non-representational and he began using watercolor, tempera and the airbrush. In 1938, he, Agnes Pelton, Emil Bisttram, Lawren Harris, Dane Rudhyar and others established the Transcendental Painting Group to further the cause of the spiritual in art. After World War II, Jonson's painting became much larger and in 1958 he started using acrylic paints.; In analyzing the spiritual in Jonson's paintings the author examines Kandinsky's, Mondrian's, and Jonson's own theories, the works of Kandinsky, the new media and techniques Jonson used, and, occasionally, various alternative, modern mystical and spiritual belief-systems. |
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