This piece is located in the Discovery Hall on the UNK campus.
Rick Johns earned his MFA in 1994 at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion where he currently lives and works as an artist and craftsman. During a 12-year hiatus from painting, Rick Johns focused on designing and building boats. This combined his woodworking skills and his design sensibilities to create functional forms that innately possessed and elicited a strong sense of beauty. In the time away from the Art world, he shed theory and academia to create work that is grounded, personal and honest. A painting is a result of a process, not unlike anything made from raw materials, and is complete when a similar sense of beauty or “rightness” is felt.
As a craftsman, Johns still designs and builds a multitude of projects from custom remodeling to site specific woodworking projects to a straw bale house. This aspect of his life has had the greatest influence on his recent painting. It is from the countless marks, notes and sketches involved in a building project to the uncovering and discovery of beauty in something that is being dismantled that is most directly inspiring his work. These remnants possess value because they have a genuine freshness and honesty. His paintings, as a result, aim to possess similar qualities and elicit an intrinsic sense of wholeness.
