The Person You should Know So Well, But Don't Know At All
Oil on canvas, 2008, 42" X 60"

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor...It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself... he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Elizabeth Johnson has a series of four large oil paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's café. These paintings are energetic figurative works and made me think of the Bay Area Expressionist movement (1940's-1960's), and the crowded compositions of German artist Max Beckman. Applying Abstract Expressionist techniques to realistic subject matter, Johnson uses the human figure because she feels it is the best vehicle for human emotions.

In these paintings her figures are simultaneously pushing rocks, disappearing behind and under rocks, and even seem to become rocks. Johnson, like Camus, contemplates the duality of human existence: the absurdity of man's "hour of consciousness" where he knows that human activity is meaningless, and all happiness is fleeting. During his life, man labors ceaselessly on, and looking over the events of his life he knows he is ultimately master of his fate. Man has his rock and "If the descent is sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy...happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth."

Elizabeth Johnson's paintings will be on view at Caffe Museo though September 2.