About Johny
Johny Midnight
“If you can hold someone’s attention for more than just a few moments then you have achieved as an artist. On lengthier inspection they may love it, they may hate it and they may or may not understand it. But the thrill is to make them stop and stare.” says Johny.
Johny paints from his own life’s adventures, so if you connect with his work it is probably because you have been to the same places; sailed the same oceans or skied the same mountains.
His work has been described as “abstract on reality” and his paintings are easy to understand as there is no hidden agenda – he just asks you to look at things in new way.
A photo can only ever give you a snapshot in time but Johny’s work can give you the changing light on a mountain from sunrise to sunset in one picture.
A brief background goes some thing like this; King James College Henley on Thames, Maidenhead Foundation Course and London College of Printing for his BA Hons in Graphic Design, but he only stuck it out for two years because “I did not want to become a clone of the tutors.”
After a lot of to-and-fro between the French Alps and London, he finally settled in Chamonix beneath Mont Blanc and the Aiguille du Midi.
At the time there were no art gallery for Johny to offer up his work so using the French word ‘Entrepreneur’ he opened his own. The first gallery was a small shed-like affair in the car park of the Grand Montets. Eight years later Gallery Midnight was an established and welcomed part of down town Chamonix life.
Apres ski at the gallery was often busier than some of the local bars and it was the only place in the Alps to find modern fine art of the Alps themselves. Johny declares “I can only paint what I have been a part of, so part of my job was to go skiing every day.”
The gallery closed for a year whilst the landlord made repairs, so via India, Johny ended up in the Caribbean on the island of St Lucia.
The year was spent portraying local life as well as the expat community. “My aim was to find the colours of the Caribbean without painting a coconut tree” says Johny. The light and colour in his island work is uncomparable with his alpine paintings so much so that you would be forgiven to think it was a different artist.