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Johnny's Bio
Artist, performer and sculptor Johnny Lapham is a servant to intuition. Casting his own hands into plaster and coating them with lush cloth ribbons that drip from his fingertips. Escaping man-made order and control by painting with eyes shut and no idea what color is on the brush. Massaging moving monologues out of thin air from dog-eared laundry lists of urges and diversions aching to be heard.
Johnny explores releasing inhibition and giving full weight and love to ones personal imagery. All art comes from the artist in each of us having the guts, the impulse, the unbearable need to say, "This!" and "This!" and "This!" This is it! Look at this! This is how it feels to me now. This is what I see. This is the story, the image, the color of the wound I just can't shake.
As a teacher Johnny takes pains to create a place for you to exercise your intuitive expression. In color. In imagery. In form. In art, body, soul, spirit and voice. Johnny deeply values each artist's intuitive process and creating the safe container for no-holds-barred risk-taking expression. He believes in grounding our work in our lived experience and using creative exploration as a form on storytelling, memoir, self-reflection and self-discovery. Johnny wants each artist to take home something unexpectedly beautiful, true or spiritually evocative. Art is alive!
Johnny has been an artist and performer all his life, making a colorful mess or theater (or both) out of whatever he laid eyes on (or vice versa). Mud pie crocodiles on the rain splattered edges of puddles he'd just been dancing in. Marching about singing an ode to a fallen hotdog on a stick at the family picnic. Spontaneously disecting how young Johnny molded himself after JFK, Jesus and James Bond while cradling a bag of discarded crucifixes waiting to be given fresh eyes and golden wings.
He received a Master of Fine Arts from The Museum School where highlights included lying on the ground improvising torch songs as confessional therapy and giving the five year old back the crayon box in the form of craypa stripe drawings and gaily painted plastic animals. After they let him graduate Johnny taught a series of well-loved art and performance classes in the early 2000's, paused to deepen his own work in The Big Hand, and is now back to share the art and theater spirit with a few more brave, scared, scarred, sacred and hungry fellow souls.
(photo by Adam Gooder)