She was a highly trained artist who didn’t know what to paint.
“I had studied with some of the major plein air watercolorists in California, learning to paint everything you could think of,” says Pat Johnson of her first five years out of college. “My Stanford professor [Daniel Mendelowitz] said it was time to stop studying and just get out there and paint.”
But what? Determined to master the hardest outdoor subject she could find, the Long Beach artist chose boats.
Boats, she says, pose challenges similar to the human figure. “You have to know the proportions and anatomy; you start from the core. Each boat has a personality. Every boat leans in a certain way —I like to go aboard and get a feel for that. Often, I paint a boat while it’s moving, which is difficult because the point of reference and lighting constantly change.”
Johnson spent her days at the harbor and shipyards, painting fishing boats, freighters, yachts and Navy gunboats. There she met and became a protégée of watercolorist Arthur Beaumont, an official Navy combat artist. In the early 1960s, Johnson received that designation herself, becoming the Navy’s sole female combat artist on the West Coast and one of just a handful in the nation.
The Navy began commissioning accomplished civilian artists in 1941, reasoning that “unlike the objective camera lens, the artist not only captures instantaneous action but can fuse earlier moments into a compelling image.” Navy combat artists don’t always work under combat conditions. Johnson has painted ships, submarines, helicopters and aircraft at the Navy base in Long Beach as well as at sea, “but never while the ship was under fire—they wouldn’t let me,” she says.
Her first big solo exhibition, which opened in Los Angeles in 1974 and toured for several years thereafter, featured 55 works chronicling Navy history since the late 19th century. Today, hundreds of her paintings are displayed in the Pentagon, on ships, in Navy installations, in military museums and in private collections.
Johnson uses only pure transparent watercolor, wet into wet with dry brush accent—a demanding medium that gives her works luminosity, she says. Still living on the coast (in Palos Verdes, a half-hour north of Long Beach), she continues to paint boats while teaching, lecturing and promoting the arts through numerous organizations. Lately, she’s been painting something different: portraits of vintage cars, most recently a moody depiction of Fred Astaire’s 1927 Rolls Royce after a downpour in Beverly Hills.
Going from warships to celebrity vehicles isn’t so much of a leap when you consider the artist’s roots. Her father was marine engineer Ted Geary, who designed Navy ships during World War II and later designed yachts for Hollywood stars. Johnson—surely his most impressive creation of all—says wistfully, “He died too young to see what I could do.”
