I used to be in my second yr of faculty once I first heard concerning the different people artist Daniel Johnston. It was the autumn of 2017, two years earlier than his dying, and a classmate I appreciated needed to indicate me a track. On his laptop computer, he opened an album from September 1983 titled Hello, How Are You with a black-and-white cowl that includes a easy line drawing: a peculiar-looking frog creature with wide-open eyes hovering above his head and a gaping mouth formed like a Cheerio cereal. The character regarded as if it had been conceived by a toddler, not not like the album’s whimsical songs referencing cheeseburger smiles and the expertise of strolling a cow.
The wide-eyed frog referred to as Jeremiah the Harmless is Johnston’s most iconic character, immortalized not solely by the artist’s home-recorded cassette album, but additionally a beloved brick mural in Austin, Texas; collaborations with mainstream footwear and attire manufacturers; and sought-after posters and t-shirts just like the one famously donned by late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.
This illustration is only a sliver of the huge visible lexicon that animated Johnston’s musical output and lifelong struggles with bipolar and manic-depressive dysfunction, as explored within the ongoing exhibition I Assume, I Draw, I Am, on view at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn by way of August 10. Spanning greater than 300 marker and pen works on paper set to the soundtrack of Johnston’s songs, the present examines the recurring motifs, themes, and stylistic components that seem all through Johnston’s artwork, which he was recognized to supply impulsively and obsessively.
Displayed with out titles in similar picket frames, the drawings are pulled from the 1000’s of authentic artworks comprising the Daniel Johnston Belief, which is managed at this time by Dick Johnston, the artist’s older brother who additionally sits on the board for the Hello, How Are You Basis, a psychological well being nonprofit established in his honor.
“Folks caught on to this that Daniel was one thing …They didn’t know if he was going someplace or not, however he propelled every kind of individuals,” Dick Johnston advised Hyperallergic.
Tinged with darkish humor, the drawings vary in tone and content material, however are likely to revolve round related clashes between good and evil, hope and despair, and love and anguish, exemplified by heroic characters pitted in opposition to villainous figures. These embrace Johnston’s personal innovations, like a flying eyeball referred to as Fly Eye; Jeremiah’s foil, the multi-headed Vile Corrupt; and a hollow-headed boxer named Joe, which reemerges all through the drawings, providing commentary that alludes to the artist’s private inside monologue.
Curated by Lee Foster, who co-owns Electrical Girl Studios and serves because the curatorial advisor for the Daniel Johnston Belief, the Pioneer Works present is a glimpse into the dizzying psyche of an artist whose maximalist artistic output was his most important type of resistance in opposition to his psychological demons. It’s a well-recognized storyline, akin to that of artists like Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Vincent Van Gogh. Johnston’s close-up marker portrait of the latter depicts the painter engrossed in a examine of his mutilated left ear, which he’s recognized to have minimize off throughout a psychological breakdown. (Johnston, for the document, was recognized to have had bouts of violence throughout the worst of his psychological sickness and was institutionalized a number of occasions, as explored completely in Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary, The Satan and Daniel Johnston.)
Most of the items include references to Johnston’s ardour for comics: Captain America, Superman, and different heroes make frequent appearances as redemptive figures. One other working tangent is Johnston’s harrowing fixation with the satan — a concern stemming from his Christian fundamentalist upbringing that was magnified by psychotic sickness. This paranoia is illustrated in an amusing drawing depicting the heavy metallic band Metallica, a gaggle he was satisfied was satanic; on this vein, he portrays the band’s drummer as a skeleton.
Unrequited love can be a thread all through the drawings, lots of which embrace portrayals of ladies with flipped bob hairdos. These are juxtaposed in opposition to eerie, reductive, and limbless feminine types, and one work that merely facilities on the pinnacle of a blonde-haired girl whose physique is substituted with a human foot. “I’ll simply flip and stroll away, by no means return,” she says in floating speech bubbles.
Throughout a panel occasion at Pioneer Works in late June, Dick Johnston recalled their father’s characterization of those fascinations. “My Dad would say, ‘He believed within the thought of affection, however he couldn’t execute it … It was an unreachable factor, and he idolized it in such a means that he made it unreachable,’” Johnston mentioned.
The present aligns with the discharge of a guide centered on the late artist and his legacy. Authored by Foster, Daniel Johnston: I’m Afraid Of What I May Draw (2025) displays on 4 a long time of Johnston’s art work and options essays by artists who’ve been impressed by his work. It comes after the publication of photographer Jung Kim’s Daniel Johnston: Is At all times (2023), which affords an intimate view of the final years of Johnston’s life and the quick aftermath of his dying.
On the June panel, Foster described Johnston’s creativity as “manic obsessive,” versus being purely intentional. “You couldn’t have stopped him,” Foster mentioned. “It was simply going to return out a method or one other.”
Or, as Johnston’s highschool buddy defined within the 2005 movie: “He by no means sits and thinks, ‘What am I gonna do?’ He simply grabs one thing.”
