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Altitudes
Lisa Johnson
February 12- March 15, 2026
Artist Talk & Reception: Thursday March 5, 6 -8pm
Altitudes is a solo exhibition by Lisa Johnson featuring works created during a residency in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, in February 2025.
Working primarily in oil on canvas, with a small selection of watercolours, Johnson depicts rugged terrain and cliffs from elevated vantage points. A sense of fog and stillness permeates the works, while confident, deliberate lines give the paintings a quiet momentum.
Balancing restraint and movement, atmosphere and structure, the layered compositions create a quiet drama, evoking a sense of epic scale and emphasizing the powerful beauty found in nature.
Through subtle shifts in tone, layered textures, and assured gestural marks, the paintings draw viewers into a meditative encounter with rugged landscapes, where stillness and momentum coexist.
About Lisa Johnson
Lisa Johnson’s artistic practice began in dance, where she developed an appreciation for the freedom of movement, a principle that continues to inform her painting. Her work combines sweeping brushstrokes and gestural lines to create expressive, abstract landscapes that convey both energy and emotion.
Drawing on the tradition of action painting, Johnson captures the interplay between external environments and internal states. Through refined line, tonal nuance, and expressive mark-making, Johnson invites viewers to engage with her distinctive perspective on landscape and abstraction.
“One way or another, my life and work have always revolved around landscape,” she reflects. Her connection to the natural world is rooted in her family’s long history of working with land and natural materials: her father, Brad Johnson, was a well-known landscape architect; one grandfather ran Johnson’s Nurseries in Kingston, and another managed lumber mills in northeastern Ontario in the early 20th century.
Though born in Toronto, she spent every summer with her grandmother at Mazinaw Lake, surrounded by dramatic granite cliffs and towering pines that continue to inform her vision of landscape.
Johnson’s work is shown in galleries across the country and can be found in private and corporate collections in Canada, USA, Asia & Europe.
View more works by Lisa Johnson here.