Childhood trips to Arizona to visit his grandmother, a landscape watercolorist, proved to be a milestone in the career of Brett Allen Johnson, who would grow up to paint the Southwestern landscape himself. Based currently in Lehi, Utah, Johnson worked as a carpenter for 16 years after college. This career path has proven beneficial in his artistic practice, helping him visualize and execute an idea. The work of the Taos Society of Artists and Maynard Dixon showed Johnson that the West “could be as modern as he wanted.” He has enjoyed blending contemporary and traditional aesthetics in his images of the Southwest ever since. While Johnson makes regular pilgrimages throughout the West, his paintings do not represent specific places. Instead, “I like to invite observers into a world which is merely similar to the one they know, an adjacent world. Perhaps, the adjacent West.” Johnson has spent most of his life living in and visiting various states in the West, including New Mexico. “I’ve developed a real love for Taos,” he says. “I just adore it all.”

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