About

Meet Artist Carol Johnson

With an affinity for the Old Masters, especially French artists like Boucher, Fragonard and Manet, Carol Johnson’s bold use of color, exuberant pattern and expressive style lends a unique twist to both her original painting and her recreations of iconic images.

A self-taught artist, her style has been honed over the years. She infuses her figurative art with a passion for the subject, as well as lightheartedness and humor.

This shows most clearly in her adaptations that bring new life to Old Masterworks. 

Joy is the hallmark of her paintings. Johnson’s vivacious color and fluid strokes draw the viewer into the “present” of the subject, creating a timeless quality to her paintings.

“When looking at my work makes the viewer happy, I consider it a success,” says Johnson.

Broad Appeal: Collectors to Decorators

Collectors

Carol Johnson’s delight in figurative painting is reflected in both her originals and in works reminiscent of the old masters. These works give collectors an opportunity to have a beloved and familiar painting, though always with a unique twist from the artist’s humorous sensibility—a hallmark of her original paintings.

Commissions

Portraits are a specialty—portraits of children, other family members or pets. Commemorating a favorite vacation scene with an original painting is also a frequent request.

Home Décor

From contemporary to Country French, home decorators love having a source for paintings and prints that coordinate with certain style and color palette.

Paintings or Prints

Carol Johnson’s original paintings are available as high-resolution pigmented inkjet prints (also known as giclées), on archival rag paper or canvas. The prints can be ordered the same size as the original painting, or half size.

About Giclée Prints

Pigmented inkjet prints were first developed in 1989-1991 by Nash Editions as a more flexible, digital alternative to lithographic prints. They were called Giclée (zhee-KLAY) Prints to differentiate them from lithographs and regular inkjet prints, which at the time were of low quality. The term “giclée” is now being discarded in favor of the more descriptive “pigmented inkjet” prints.

One essential ingredient to the stability and quality of these prints is the use of fade-resistant, pigmented inks with a lightfastness rating of 85 years. The color gamut is enhanced by the addition of light magenta and light cyan to the traditional four-color CMYK process.

Printing resolution is the second ingredient. The Epson 4000 and 9600 series inkjet printers used for Carol Kiefer’s prints use a seven-color system with the capability to produce a single drop of ink as small as 4 picoliters. These printers lay down over two million drops of ink per square inch of paper, assuring the finest reproductions available today.

The quality achieved by high-resolution printing with pigmented inks has moved giclée prints into collections of art museums throughout the world.