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In the Grass embraces the difficulty of comprehending, articulating, or categorizing contemporary lived experience. Occurring in Johanson’s work are broad themes connected to the human condition such as love, consolation, precariousness, frustration and death. The artist addresses these fundamental experiences and expresses his relationship to an increasingly dehumanizing and unstable world. Themes of theft, exploitation, confusion, distraction, friendship and love are ideas that permeate the works, which are figurative though painted without source material. Each work is suggestive of narrative, some inviting interpretation more than others. Slippages in the reading of forms is of keen interest to Johanson, and the artist challenges communication through visual imagery by accepting, inviting, and working with the possibility of multiple readings.

In rendering the forms, Johanson works with a fluidity where legs and arms can dissolve into each other or a figure can be integrated into the ground. Instability keeps the image in flux and the viewers’ imagination engaged and participating in the understanding of the imagery. The integration of abstraction and figuration is key because it demonstrates that both are of the same thought process, which is interconnected with the production of the painting. The changing and moving of the paint is a part of the stirring up of ideas and development of the imagery.