1999 was a year of firsts for the then 30-year-old painter Johanna Harmon (b. 1968). It marked the first time she had visited a large city (Boston), savored her first bowl of New England clam chowder, boarded her first ferry, and taken her first subway ride. That subway brought her to the first major art institution she had ever visited — the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. More important to Harmon as an artist was the exhibition she saw there, a retrospective of oil paintings, watercolors, and mural studies by John Singer Sargent — 160 works in all.
A number of those Sargents stayed in her memory, such as the portraits of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (which Harmon describes as a “powerful com- position of soft tones, lost and found edges”) and Miss Elsie Palmer (“the low-key tones, coupled with her central pose and deep-set eyes, convey emotion, mood, and mystery”). She was also struck by Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife (“selective placement of chromatic colors that lead your eye around this quiet complementary colored painting”) and Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast (“a unique composition and use of color temperature to turn the form”).
There was another portrait of Gautreau in the exhibition, usually called Madame X, which was a succès de scandale when first exhibited in Paris in 1884. Gautreau looks away from the viewer in a haughty manner; before Sargent made some revisions, her inebriation was suggested by the slipping of a shoulder strap on her gown, which retains its plunging neck- line. A contemporary critic complained that the picture was “offensive in its insolent ugliness and defiance of every rule of art.” (Indeed, the portrait was widely ridiculed, so Sargent kept it in his studio for the next 25 years before selling it to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
For someone not accustomed to this kind of city, this kind of museum, this kind of exhibition, it was a lot to take in. “After walking through room after room of Sargent’s art, I was so overwhelmed I actually had to sit down to collect myself,” Harmon recalls. “The sheer volume of work, the variety of subjects and mediums, his prolific nature — it all just demanded respect. And I actually wondered if the man ever slept.”
APART FROM ART
Harmon had grown up in Tempe, Arizona, and now lives with her husband in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, about 15 miles south of Denver. These are places you can find on a map, but neither pos- sesses big-deal art museums. In the single-parent home in which she was raised (“fairly poor and very dysfunctional”), there was little to no expo- sure to art. Harmon notes, “I have a vague memory of being introduced to Scottsdale’s Artwalk when I was around 10,” and she made drawings of trees, animals, and people to fill up the lonely hours, as her two brothers were considerably older and not often around. “There was a period of time when my drawing skills evolved into designing clothes. And I would sew and wear them.”
Even so, studying art in college was not in Harmon’s plans. After some time at a community college, she joined a local architectural design firm, working as a project coordinator and client contact for the exhibit and real estate division. She also had become a licensed cosme- tologist during her senior year of high school and “did hair on the side.”
Life might have continued in this ho-hum vein, but she met an artist named Tom Haas (b. 1952) who was working at the same design firm and taking classes at the Scottsdale Artists’ School. Recognizing a kindred spirit who sought more than just a paycheck, Haas recom- mended that Harmon look into the school for herself.
Over a five-year period, starting in 1995, she took classes there, and that was a life-changer. “As soon as I opened the school door,” Harmon remembers, “I began looking at the paintings lining the halls, and I wept. I felt like my whole world had just finally come together. And I knew, from that moment on, that I wanted to become the best possible artist I could be. And I really never felt more at home. From then on, I spent every free moment going to their open studios and taking classes at night. I took every class I could, and I spent my vaca- tions taking workshops.” All while still working at the design firm and doing hair to pay for those classes and workshops.
In the years ahead, Harmon studied at Scottsdale, as well as the Art Students League of Denver and the Fechin Art Institute in Taos, New Mexico, continually finding ways to develop her painting skills. “The most significant impact on my work,” she says, “came around 2007: after being on a League waitlist for years, I finally got a call to take a class with Quang Ho. I was invited to his ‘Taking your work to the next level’ workshop. On the first day, we were to bring in a few paintings for review. Quang explained where everyone was succeeding and what areas needed improvement and why. While reviewing one of my [figurative] paintings, he showed me how I didn’t have a clear visual intention. Basically, the figure was describing the passage of light on form and the surrounding landscape consisted of flat tonal/value shapes more akin to an overcast day. He encouraged me to make the painting stronger by carrying the same light and shadow elements.”
The instructors at non-degree-granting schools such as Scotts- dale, the League, and Fechin have a lot to teach. There is technique, of course, and also some anatomy, some discussion of materials, some color theory, some composition, and some recent or older art history. (Degree-granting college and university art departments generally have mandatory courses in all of these subjects.) These instructors cannot assume that their students are well-versed, or even have heard of, major artists of the past and present. Harmon recalls, “At Scottsdale around 1996, I was introduced to Anders Zorn, Abbott Hander- son Thayer, Joaquín Sorolla, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, John Singer Sargent, and others through a detailed slide presentation that Daniel Gerhartz gave during my first workshop with him.”
She continues, “Dan would carve out a morning or afternoon for a presentation meticulously describing the masters’ elements and intentions, projecting beautiful slides of museum-owned works. He would show how the masters used the darkest darks, lightest lights, conservation and keying of values, temperature shifts to turn form, use of color, chromatic notes, texture, soft/sharp/lost and found edges. Dan’s presentations, demos, generosity of spirit, and enthusi- asm drew me to study with him repeatedly. He opened my eyes and inspired me more than any other living artist.”
DRAWING FROM THE PAST
In fact, that fateful 1999 trip to Boston — initially planned to visit an artist with whom she had bonded at Fechin — was timed to coincide with the MFA’s retrospective of Sargent, an artist Harmon had here- tofore experienced only via slide projector.
Today one can discern a bit of Sargent in Harmon’s many paint- ings of young women, seemingly lost in thought and looking toward something the viewer cannot see. Sargent painted scenes of (European) streets and regular people moving along them, but he is best known for likenesses of the privileged few living the good life. “Sargent’s work reflects his world and time,” Harmon observes, but her art often reflects a greater interest in the world Sargent knew than her own. Her oil painting The Clearing, for instance, shows a young woman in a long, ruffled dress walking into the woods, while The Reading Nook presents a similarly clad woman searching for something to read in a private library. They could both be characters in a Willa Cather novel. No one in Harmon’s visual world is distracted by cell phones or dressed
for anything other than attending a fancy party or dreamily preparing for bed. Perhaps, Harmon muses, in contrast to our own place and time, Sargent’s world “was just visually beautiful.”
This is not to say that Harmon is averse to the “cutting-edge” contemporary art we see in museums and galleries today — works generally less interested in emotion than social critique, irony, or comments about other art. Today she regularly visits major art muse- ums, but what she sees there is unlikely to “change the trajectory I’m on,” she says. “To be authentic, you must follow your own path. You can’t listen to other people’s opinions about who you want or need to be.”
This is also not to say that Harmon never refer- ences modern life; rather, she dresses up the present to look of a piece with the world that Daniel Gerhartz and other instructors opened up for her. Her oil paint- ing A Sense of Calm shows a young red-haired woman, wearing a white jacket and vertically striped dress, leaning against a window frame and looking down- ward, seeming to ponder something. (A lot of Har- mon paintings appear to illustrate a story at which we can only guess.) Again, this could be a Cather char- acter, or maybe even one from George Eliot or Jane Austen, but in fact the model was a stranger Harmon
met in a Starbucks. The artist recalls, “She was interacting with some- one I later learned was her sister. I was just observing her. The enthu- siasm and liveliness about her intrigued me.” To be sure, there is little enthusiasm or liveliness in A Sense of Calm, but that may not matter. It turns out that, in real life, this model was leveraging animatronics to augment learning in children with early challenges such as autism. That’s interesting, but, more importantly, Harmon thought this woman has an interesting face and holds herself in an interesting way. Painting is a visual medium, after all.
Harmon cannot afford to be shy about approaching strangers who look interesting, such as the coffee barista in Boulder, Colorado, whom she convinced to pose for Threshold, which shows a man standing out- side a door. This painting might be mistaken for something created more than a century ago but for the colorful wristband he is wearing.
The world that Sargent, Thayer, Sorolla and other 19th-century masters captured offers many temptations. Today, Harmon notes, “Everything just seems so temporary. Back then, things were made with craft and time — they were meant to last. And I just think things were quieter then.”
What is of the current moment may not be the look of Harmon’s paintings but, rather, the emotional and intellectual connections she makes with her models. She adds, “Recently I even had a model ask me to be her birthing partner. And I actually cut the umbilical cord and helped deliver her little girl.” The artist as doula. To Harmon’s mind, the figures she paints are actual people but also, for her purposes, shapes in a space. “I really abstract it out. I look at things purely as shapes, values, unique specific shapes, arrangements of shapes, color, texture, edges. I don’t necessarily view it as the human form.” Her thinking may align with that of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who originally titled his most famous painting (now known as Whistler’s Mother) Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1.
FULL CIRCLE
Harmon’s instructors made an impression on her, but she also made an impression on them. Painter Charles Warren Mundy recalls, “When I first met her at Scottsdale, then at En Plein Air Masters in France, it was apparent Johanna was going to become a great painter, because of the commitment I saw during my instruction, and later the effort and passion she continues to manifest.” Not having college-level training in studio art did not strike Mundy or another of her work- shop instructors, Daniel Sprick, as a drawback in Harmon’s ability to fulfill her artistic potential. “What I have seen,” Sprick notes, “is that more effective painting and sculpture instruction can be found out- side of the university system than in it, especially in the last 20 years as ateliers have emerged throughout the U.S. and Europe.” He adds that “there are many reports from students who have graduated from prestigious university programs that all they learned there was how to talk about art in cryptic and incomprehensible ways.”
In 2000, after five years of classes at Scottsdale Artists’ School, various workshops elsewhere, and, more importantly, the sense that painting was what she wanted to pursue full-time, Harmon — with the support of her husband, whom she had married three years earlier — decided to forgo her salaried and temp jobs in favor of a career in art, with the idea that they could “revisit the decision in 12 months.” Within a year, she was invited by Denver’s Merrill-John- son Gallery of Fine Art to join its stable. It closed after the owners
turned their attention elsewhere, so now Harmon is represented by McLarry Fine Art (Santa Fe) and Newbury Fine Arts (Boston). Newbury director Elizabeth Novick notes that her clients, many of them European, lean toward figurative art and “find Johanna’s work quite fresh.” It seems, then, that Harmon has happily come full cir- cle — back to Boston, where she first experienced Sargent’s artistry in person 23 years ago.
