Anne Johnstone
Inner Worlds
Anne Johnstone’s paintings and drawings transform interior experience into color-dense, emotionally charged compositions. Her work explores fear, anxiety, overwhelm, physical awareness, and the complexities of everyday life through abstracted figures, expressive marks, and imagery that can be both psychologically intense and unexpectedly humorous.
Working between abstraction and figuration, Johnstone creates compositions that feel animated and unsettled, where forms emerge, overlap, and push against one another. Bold color, vigorous brushwork, and asymmetrical arrangements give her work a sense of movement and tension while leaving space for play and ambiguity.
Shop Available Works on 1stDibs →
Secure checkout, shipping, and collector services available through 1stDibs.
Selected Works
Each work is a one-of-a-kind painting or mixed-media on board. Click individual works for details or purchase.
Available works typically range from $650–$2,500.
About the Work
Johnstone approaches painting and drawing as a way of giving form to her interior world. Fear, anxiety, overwhelm, physical sensation, and other difficult emotions become characters and visual experiences within the work, often softened by humor and the expressive language of comics.
Her process is physical and intuitive, allowing the movement of her body and the qualities of her materials to shape the image. Acrylic, oil pastel, crayon, gouache, pencil, and collage produce distinct kinds of marks and textures, while glazing and layered color reveal the history of the work's construction.
Johnstone is drawn to imbalance and asymmetry, using them to create compositions that feel active without losing their sense of structure. Figures and abstraction can occupy the same space, while scribbled marks, obscured forms, and unexpected gestures create psychological dramas that remain open to interpretation.
Biography
Anne Johnstone is an American contemporary artist based in the greater Boston area. She studied Studio Art with a concentration in French at the University of Massachusetts Boston, graduating magna cum laude, and has maintained a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, drawing, collage, assemblage, and masks.
Johnstone has presented solo and group exhibitions throughout New England, including exhibitions at Concord Art, Brickbottom Gallery, the Aidron Duckworth Art Museum, Newton Free Library, and other regional venues. Her work has been featured in exhibitions of mixed media painting and continues to explore the intersection of abstraction, figuration, emotional experience, and material process.
Inquiries
For works not currently listed online or additional information, please contact the gallery.