Born in 1966, painter and musician James F Johnston has primarily been known for his work as a musician: his own band Gallon Drunk, a former member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and more recently touring and recording with PJ Harvey. His turn to figurative painting began small scale in hotel rooms on tour, a reaction to writer’s block that became his primary focus as a daily studio practice. The paintings are bold and loose, marked by their rich and striking use of colour. The often unsettling, totemic and darkly humorous images sit between the everyday and the world of the imagination, grounded with a sense of simplicity and beauty.
Uncommon Ground, his new solo show at Fitzrovia Gallery, keeps faith with that register while pushing it somewhere starker. The raw paintings capture something archetypal, medieval and psychological about the humble human, and Johnston’s expressive, saturated use of paint opens deep wells for the viewer to fall into. A lone house crouches under a splitting sky, lightning forking toward its roof across a bruised field. A black cat rears out of teal darkness, two yellow eyes burning above a low, half-lit town. Peopled by animals and haunted figures, the work carries an expressionistic looseness of touch and a love of symbolist northern landscape painting: the natural world made unnatural. Even in lonely settings Johnston finds the human points that make the work evocative, soulful and nuanced, and viewed from a distance the melancholy becomes a tender companion.
In his own words:
“There’s a sense of unease to a lot of these paintings, a tension I don’t quite know where it comes from. They all start like a Rorschach test: I begin with a mark and follow it, chasing where it goes, and the composition forms from there. It can be surprising to me what comes out. There’s a painting of a fox and an owl in the show, and to me the fox is my grandmother and I’m the owl. My grandmother lived with the family and she was a self-taught painter. I used to be completely mesmerised by how she could create something as if by magic, and I still get that excitement watching an image emerge in the studio. Working this way keeps things unpredictable and exciting; you’re just lost in it.
A lot of the music I used to make, certainly with Gallon Drunk, was very urban, and it’s interesting how, when I’m painting, so many of the images seem to relate to the natural world. I find animals can be a good and often humorous way to convey something about the human psyche.
I love painting figures too, people in rooms or people in isolation. Quite often the gaze is at the viewer, and maybe that reflects the intensity I get from the painting while I’m making it, when it holds your attention as if looking at the camera.
Much like the music I used to make, I love to keep a looseness in the paintings, and for me that’s where the life is, in the slightly broken line. But really they’re all captured moments, part of open, open-ended narratives. What’s happening, and what’s about to happen? Nothing is too finalised, and I think that’s what gives life and a necessary mystery to a picture. That’s what holds my attention, and that’s what pulls me in.”
— James F Johnston
The results gather the audience around gripping stories of narrative entropy: scenes and characters worn down to their essential forms, brushed aside perhaps, but unforgettable. Each picture sits between the benign and the malevolent, bright but sinister, the strangeness balanced with humour. Faces turn to meet the viewer and the gaze holds. Nothing settles too far, and that enigmatic menace, that refusal to finish, is where the life of the painting lives.
Uncommon Ground marks another Fitzrovia outing for a Trebuchet alumnus, following his solo shows The Human Menagerie (2023), Illuminated (2024) and World of Interiors (2025), and his Trebuchet subscriber prints A Reckoning (2020) and The Passenger (2024). His work has travelled onto book covers and album sleeves, into international arts publications, and into the collection of the University of Chicago Center in Paris. The Economist has praised a remarkable gift for loose, raw painting that imprints itself on the viewer’s imagination, and Nick Cave calls the pictures full of mythic power.
Uncommon Ground by James F Johnston runs at Fitzrovia Gallery, 139 Whitfield Street, London W1, from 8 to 13 September 2026. Private view 8th Sept 6-9pm
James F Johnston at Fitzrovia Gallery
Uncommon Ground, Daisy Laing Gallery, Penzance, from 25th September until end of November
Uncommon Ground, the show is a thematic continuation of the London show, expanded with different work , while incorporating several key paintings from the Fitzrovia show
Images courtesy of the Artist © James F Johnston
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
