Artist Profile: Isaiah Johns

The lead storytellers in artist Isaiah Johns’s paintings are nature’s sweeping vistas, dense forests, brawny mountains and large land animals. 

“I’m inspired by creation. There’s something that’s within me that loves the land, the wildlife, the water, the sunrise,” Johns said. “I would sound like a weirdo running around telling people about how beautiful all of this is, so that’s why I paint. That’s my way of sharing it.”

But that doesn’t mean Johns, 44, believes in happy accidents. 

The Fargo-Moorhead-based representational artist whose work is in galleries across the country tends to see creative “mistakes” as a green light to scrutinize the details until they are just right.

“A painting or a photo or a video is just a continuation of correcting mistakes until you give up correcting,” Johns. “ [You keep doing it] over and over and over until you’re tired of doing it.”

Johns primarily sells to private collectors and is currently showing at Western Skies Fine Art, Afton, Wyo., Underbrush Gallery, Fargo, and Native Jackson Gallery, Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Some may call it perfectionism, but for artists like Johns, who “picks at paintings” until he deems them “good enough,” near-perfection is still a worthy pursuit. Plus, refinements are an option if he wants to turn day into night or fall into winter.

Watch: Isaiah Johns transform a fall landscape into a winter wonderland

Johns’s work reminds viewers that the pursuit of perfection is a brave act of defiance against the “good enough” mentality. Every brushstroke is an intentional editing of the storyline, expertly balanced by hidden abstract flourishes. 

On perfection and process

“There has to be some perfectionism,” he said, admitting that a lot of the details he scrutinizes closely are ones viewers would never notice. “Nobody else is going to care, but there’s something about that drive that isn’t taught [in school]. There are things that I care immensely about and need to be as close to perfect as I can. But that’s a big contradiction because part of me says it doesn’t need to be perfect.”

Much of Johns’s creative practice and discipline is steeped in the traditions of plein air-style painting. From the French for “open air,” plein air artists paint in the outdoors, sometimes  spending hours in one spot to best capture the landscape in front of them. 

“The bulk of it to me is laying the groundwork for a little bit of magic to happen. That’s what people ultimately love about art,” Johns said. “The refinement and the most frustrating part of the process for me, that takes the longest.”

On passion and purpose

Using a photo for detail along with small sketches for testing color and atmosphere, the artist’s intention as a representational painter is to create deep, awe-inspiring paintings that are unbelievably realistic from afar yet wonderfully abstract up close. 

Although beautiful at first glance, looking at his work up close reveals a complexity in the  artists’ choices of texture, stroke, nuance.

Johns doesn’t limit himself to a traditional canvas to demonstrate his skill, either. YouTube is another platform where viewers can find his work. His channel includes videos of himself painting outdoors in all kinds of weather while he explains certain artistic choices he makes and why.

Plein Air Painting: Step-by-Step – Cold, Windy, and Worth It

No matter where he’s showing his work, whether on YouTube or in galleries, Johns ultimately hopes to impart some of his own passion for his subjects onto fans of his work and worldview.

On patience and perseverance 

Johns’s commercial photography and videography business, Outdoor Studio, also keeps him busy with referrals from Realtors and hospitality-sector businesses in the United States and Canada.

“I love this work because I get to see the landscape and show what the place feels like, not just what it looks like,” he said. “I’m blessed that the people who hire me to do that understand and are thankful that I’m able to capture that beauty for them.”

Although Johns has been drawing his entire life, photography and painting continue to be both the easiest and most challenging aspects of his creative life—but for different reasons.

“Painting is harder because it takes longer,” he said. “If I want to adjust the sky of an oil painting, that’s going to take half a day depending on the size. Whereas photography, it’s a couple seconds. Unless you miss a shot.”

Just as when he’s painting, when shooting photos or videos, his muse is that same wonder and awe of nature he interprets in his paintings. 

“It’s the birds chirping outside the golf course clubhouse that makes a video like a painting with layers and complexity. I’m not a movie director, but it’s the same feeling I get when I’m painting,” he said.

While Johns’s primary focus will continue to be painting, he said that Outdore Studio allows him to explore adjacent creative mediums while garnering additional income. 

On parents and perception 

Johns grew up splitting time between his father’s home in Idaho and his mother’s home in Breckenridge, Minn. His father, a Native American from Hopi lineage in Arizona, encouraged his son’s awe and love of nature.

“I grew up around my dad doing Native crafts and oil painting and selling them at powwows,” he said, adding that his father’s sense of wonder and awe at nature most certainly influenced his creative path.

“Not all parents understand how much they influence our perceptions of things when we are children. I remember my dad pointing out the way the sun was coming up, and as a kid I didn’t really take all of that in until I got older,” Johns added. “Now with my kids, I do the exact same thing.”

Johns learned even more about sketching, landscape and nudes by looking at old journals his mother kept from during her relationship with his father. 

“There’s a sensibility in some people who go a little deeper when we’re looking at things, whether it’s the landscape or even other people. I’m always trying to go a little deeper,” he said. 

On sobriety and struggle

Johns quit drinking at age 38 after recognizing how partying had become a major barrier to  his growth as an artist.

“I got sober in 2019 and that was probably the most difficult year and a half I’ve ever had,” he said. “After decades of not really pursuing my art the way I should because I was out drinking, I then realized art was something I could do that was bigger than any of my problems.” 

Johns doesn’t express personal experiences like getting sober in his art. Instead, he veers towards environmental subjects like mountains, animals, water and portraiture, choosing to focus on the outer world to reach a contemplative inner space, rather than the other way around. 

Some of this comes from Johns’s belief that artists sometimes take a dark period too far, and as a consequence, lose ground in growing creatively.

“It can be their demise if they double down on their troubles for the sake of their art,” he said. “I think I chose a different road to handle the hard stuff, that maybe it was a temporary situation in my life. Art was always the compass, what I wanted to share with people. It’s the constant in my life, and it’s in looking for those intimate scenes, that beauty in nature and that drive to share something higher than myself, that has been my constant.”

On creativity and community

Johns is an Aptitude creative art studio artist in residence where he works alongside a dozen+ local artists. 

Aptitude is located in West Acres Shopping Center, Best Buy wing. Developed by The Arts Partnership and generously supported by West Acres, the private, individual studio spaces are an affordable way for local artists to practice and promote their art in a co-op-inspired space. 

Johns moved into the space in 2021 and considers it a critical tool for his growth as a seller of his own work. And for building community among other artists from the area.

“What I love about Aptitude is we’re attached to a mall. I would never get a chance to have people come through and look at my art in the way I enjoy at Aptitude,” Johns said. “I love it. I’m very appreciative that it exists. For artists to find affordable space to create is extremely difficult.”

For now, Johns is happy working out of Aptitude, recording YouTube videos and working with galleries. As long as he has nature and a canvas with easel, he’ll always find a way back to the subject matter at hand: going a little deeper, purposeful refinement and reverence for nature.

“When I see something that moves me, it often becomes something I want to share with the world, and that often expresses itself in my painting,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a wide open vista, sometimes it’s a very open scene. They both represent a feeling I’m trying to share. One is not more important or significant than the other. It’s something that I’ve felt is something I want others to see and interpret and feel in their own way.”