Sandee Johnson became a nomad after earning her postgraduate degree and has not stopped since. For the past 45 years, she has continuously evolved her career as a professional artist, photographer, and writer, with a portfolio that reflects both her boundless wanderlust and her keen observational eye. Her art has reached audiences around the world through over 200 exhibitions, spanning solo, group, and corporate showcases, in cities that define the global art landscape: Amsterdam, Paris, Beijing, Brussels, Chicago, New York, Tokyo, Geneva, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Seoul, Shanghai, Berlin, Budapest, Rome, Luxembourg, Stockholm, Lisbon, and Washington, D.C. Each exhibition, each destination, has contributed a new layer to her artistic vocabulary, enriching her practice with cultural diversity and lived experience.
A Global Artist with a Singular Vision
Sandee’s artistry cannot be confined to a single style or medium. Her work encompasses a wide range of materials and processes, from painting and photography to fiber art and collage. She primarily creates two-dimensional works but moves fluidly between realism, abstraction, surrealism, and social commentary. This versatility reflects her openness to experimentation and her deep engagement with the world around her.
Having lived or traveled in more than 90 countries, Sandee draws profound inspiration from global perspectives, absorbing colors, patterns, and philosophies from each culture she encounters. This worldly influence infuses her art with a rare universality. Whether she is responding to a fleeting moment in nature, a social issue, or an abstract emotion, her visual language carries echoes of countless landscapes and human stories.
Her work is part of museum, corporate, public, and private collections across continents, affirming her impact and resonance among diverse audiences. Yet despite her international footprint, Sandee’s creative voice remains deeply personal, anchored in introspection, travel, and transformation.
The Power of Process
Sandee’s creative process is both methodical and intuitive. She utilizes an array of mediums acrylics, drawings, encaustic monoprints, and mixed media, often merging them through collage techniques. Her exploration of texture and layering is a hallmark of her practice, suggesting both the complexity of memory and the interconnectedness of her experiences.
The artist has also participated in numerous residencies across the world, each one offering her new materials, perspectives, and challenges. These immersive experiences have not only expanded her technical range but also deepened her emotional and conceptual approach. They serve as catalysts for experimentation, spaces where travel, reflection, and creation merge seamlessly.
STILL DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION
Among Sandee’s many series, STILL DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION stands out as a powerful testament to her enduring relationship with the abstract form. The title itself reveals both humor and sincerity, a nod to her lifelong pull toward abstraction despite her comfort and skill in realism and figurative interpretation.
One of the standout works from this series, Desert Heat, embodies the raw, expressive potential of abstraction. This mixed-media piece emerged not from observation but pure imagination, a departure from representational form into an emotional landscape. Combining her drawings with acrylics, encaustic monoprint, and other mediums, Sandee creates a rich, tactile surface where color and form pulse with intensity. Through collage techniques, she binds these disparate elements together, mirroring the way her experiences from around the world coalesce into cohesive expression.
Desert Heat captures a sense of motion and energy, evoking both the vast stillness of a sun-scorched horizon and the restless creativity that defines her journey. It exemplifies her ability to balance structure and spontaneity, texture and transparency, logic and emotion.
From Everywhere to Home
After decades of travel and artistic exploration, Sandee has finally found her place of belonging in Port Townsend, Washington, a fittingly “magical” destination for an artist whose life has been a continuous odyssey. Surrounded by natural beauty and a vibrant creative community, she continues to create, reflect, and contribute to the broader dialogue of contemporary art.
Yet even in this final home, the nomadic spirit endures. Her art remains in motion, ever-evolving, boundary-defying, and deeply human. Sandee Johnson’s life and work remind us that art is not merely a product of place, but of movement, observation, and a profound openness to the world.
Conclusion
Sandee Johnson stands as a rare example of an artist who has lived her art across borders, mediums, and decades. Her work is both global and intimate, disciplined and free, layered with the experiences of a lifetime spent seeing and feeling deeply. Through series like STILL DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION and pieces such as Desert Heat, she continues to challenge herself and her audience to look beyond the visible, to sense the rhythm of color, texture, and emotion that lies beneath.
Now rooted in Port Townsend, her journey seems to have come full circle. Yet for an artist who has always been driven by curiosity and creation, every ending is only the beginning of another adventure on the canvas, and in life.
