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Black Rabbit's Red Room
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George Johanson's works of the late 1970s were described by the curator and critic Rachael Griffin as "Autobiographies, but autobiographies without events only people and settings." Related to the portraits painted and exhibited in 1976, the Autobiographies incorporate not only portraits of family members, friends, and pets but also self-portraits (including replicas of childhood photographs), portraits of Old Master artists, and still life objects that are talismans of past experience. In Black Rabbit's Red Room, the banner across the composition is Johanson's Boy Scout bandana. The cast of characters includes, from the lower right, the painter Louis Bunce, the sculptor Manuel Izquierdo in a Halloween costume, a blur of the head of the painter Jack McLarty in profile, the semi-nude figure of Johanson himself wearing a green eye-shade, George as a chubby baby in a high chair, George's elderly mother, George again in the striped shirt, and George's parents from a photograph taken when they were young. At center is a Dutch rabbit, a pet in the Johanson household who made periodic appearances in Johanson's paintings of the 1970s. One of the several large autobiographical and art historical paintings by George Johanson, Black Rabbit's Red Room includes stylized portraits of fellow artists, family members, and Johanson himself. The figures, from the lower right, portray Louis Bunce, Manuel Izquierdo in a Halloween costume, a blur of Jack McLarty in profile, the semi-nude figure of Johanson wearing a green eyeshade, Johanson as a chubby baby in a highchair, his elderly mother, Johanson again in the striped shirt, and his mother and father rendered from a photograph taken when they were young. Rabbits and nudes are frequent subjects in Johanson's work of the 1970s. The banner across the composition is Johanson's Boy Scout bandanna.