(dark cityscape)

Ynez Johnston

This drawing was done in 1956, most likely when the artist was in Colorado Springs. It was during this time she met Mark Rothko and "he gave me a very kindly critique of my work - a cheering memory."

Art critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1956, the year this drawing was done:

"Ynez Johnston is an artist who has mastered a fabulous, very personal, very important, and all but indescribable style. Miss Johnston fuses dream and improvisation...in the infinite, unbelievably minute elaboration of her design, which often takes on an almost microscopic character. Her scale can be very deceptive, however; once it entraps the eye it leads it through extraordinary shifts and reversals, so that the microscopic is revealed as immense vanishes into the small... the little forms are half abstract and half representational; they are patches of color and line and they are also towers, battlements, facades, and domes. They are static like aerial photographs, and they flow like old maps..."