Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: misscourtneyjohnson.com
Courtney Johnson (b. 1981) is a painter based in San Francisco, California. She received her BA from Prescott College in 2004 and her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2011. She has lived and worked in San Francisco throughout her career, developing a distinctive practice in oil on canvas that has earned her representation at Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco.
Johnson came to wide notice with her 2019 solo exhibition Reptilian Brain at Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, and has since continued to develop her singular pictorial language through group and solo presentations across the Bay Area and nationally. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, and she has shown at venues including the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles, and multiple San Francisco and Oakland galleries.
Johnson works in oil on canvas, producing large-scale paintings that inhabit an uneasy zone between the recognizable and the otherworldly. Her compositions introduce animalistic, god-like beings into unsettling landscapes populated by variegated flora and undulating surfaces — scenes that feel simultaneously terrestrial and interstellar. Critics and curators have described her canvases as places where “ordinary light falls on objects that almost belong to this world” before forms “suddenly curl back in the light and become something else.” Rather than resolving these tensions, Johnson deliberately poses more questions than answers, allowing ambiguity to drive the viewer’s experience.
Her palette and touch carry a quality of watchfulness: shadow pools under leaves, animal silhouettes loom on the periphery, and familiar botanical forms tip toward the uncanny. The work engages a long lineage of visionary and psychedelic figuration while remaining grounded in careful observation of light and surface.
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