Toxic Gods & Black Fairy Tales is the cryptic title of the winter exhibition at Linfield University’s art gallery, and when artist Travis Johnson unveiled this collection of his paintings and sculptures at the opening reception in mid-February, he brought song and poetry with him, too.

Seated in the gallery surrounded by his work, he absorbed the physical space of the room with a series of long, deep breaths, eyes closed. The audience fell quiet. Then he began singing, filling the space with a powerful, deep voice that felt both mournful and proudly defiant:

I will breathe
I will breathe
For those who can’t breathe no more.
I will breathe, I will breathe
For those who can’t breathe no more…

The requiem, which held the audience rapt for nearly four minutes, went on to name some of those whose names are widely known because of their violent end at the hands of police: Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd, among others. He followed it with another song, then read a couple of his poems.

Johnson explained that he liked to introduce his art with music. “A lot of it comes from song,” he said, gesturing to his paintings. “Even the silly, crazy stuff comes from sitting around singing.”

Johnson told the students, faculty, and members of the public in attendance that he sings while he paints, and that he paints fast. Later, I asked him to clarify what he meant when he said he painted all but two of the nearly 30 pieces on display “this year.” This calendar year, I wondered? Surely not. The academic year seemed more likely, and made sense, given that he teaches at Willamette University in Salem.

“In January,” he confirmed.

The show runs through March 16. The show notes are not necessary to appreciate any of Johnson’s work, but they do  enrich the experience:

“Toxic Gods & Black Fairy Tales is a mythological synthesization of my history growing up in Southern California. It’s me taking the imagined cosmological stories that were told to me as a child and remixing the orientation and hierarchy. The show is me making an insertion to remark and reimagine my childhood imagination with my current lens.”

It’s a bold, visually exciting show, with paintings large and small, and four sculptures “in conversation with the paintings.” The imagery includes iconography of the desert, and faces of Black men and women, a lot of rabbits, and even a few other-worldly entities. Among the “curious critters” are an Ancient Familiar, a Little R Gremlin, and aliens (presumably) in a fleet of saucer UFOs hovering over prisoners wearing red jumpsuits in the desert.

 Johnson’s stated goal is to “collapse the sacred, serious, and whimsical into one space.” The pieces seem to blur the distinction between painting and drawing, and sometimes the recognizable imagery is distorted by or embedded in bursts of manic abstraction that recalls Basquiat. That said, he actually had four other painters in mind during his January explosion of creativity: Wayne Thiebaud, Dana Schutz, André Butzer, and Philip Guston.

“I’ve never thought about those painters all together,” he said. “But that’s what was on the surface” of his consciousness as he slapped acrylic on canvases (and sometimes wood and paper) on the second floor of Willamette’s art building. At the reception, he ticked off the stylistic moves made by each artist in their work, then pointed to how it reverberated through a particular piece of his own.

“I paint intense. A lot of times, I’ll paint seven paintings a day. It’s exhausting.”

Johnson traces his artistic journey back to the age of 8, when his mother told him to draw an illustration to accompany an older sister’s homework assignment. “That was the beginning,” he told me a week or so later when I visited his Willamette University office. “I was probably in the third grade, and I just kept going.”

He studied art in college, but spent a decade in the furniture business, a period when he produced very little art. In 2017, he told his artist sister that he was going to “plant a flag in the ground as a painter.” He was living in Washington, after trying unsuccessfully to get his work into galleries, when a friend put him in touch with a bar owner in Tumwater who wanted a few pieces for his business. When the fellow offered to buy five prints, Johnson made a counteroffer: He’d have them framed himself (a friend did it for free), then they’d hang them in the bar — not for decoration, but for sale, and they’d divide the proceeds.

The pieces sold within days.

“It was absolutely incredible,” he said. “I wish every artist could feel that, if that’s what they want to do. When you make something with your hands, not a commission, but it’s just your own thoughts and someone’s like, ‘That resonates with me, I want that,’ there are very few feelings like that.”

Johnson’s style emerged in 2019 after connecting online with the figurative expressionist, Brooklyn-based painter Michael Hafftka, who, he says, works very fast.

“Everything opened up for me as I watched this,” Johnson said. “He’d film himself on Instagram and I’m like, ‘What is this guy doing?’” They began corresponding, and his own artistry evolved.

“I asked him, ‘What are you doing? It looks like you’re just throwing stuff on the canvas,’” Johnson said. “He was like, ‘I don’t ever know what’s coming through.’ He just starts putting paint on the canvas, he’s chasing that thing, he’s chasing some sort of image. That just resonated with me and my lineage.”

Hafftka’s parents were Holocaust survivors, leaving what Johnson calls an “imprint” on the generation of their children. As a Black man in America, Johnson speaks of his own imprints of lived trauma and generational trauma, the latter forged in the holds of slave ships and on cotton plantations.

A final epiphany with Hafftka, he continued, was the inspiration to ignore the art market and popular trends and just paint. “He was like, ‘Are you going to paint what’s inside of you, or are you going to paint for the crowd, what the crowd wants?’ The artist never worries about the crowd.”

I asked Johnson if he starts with an image, an idea or a feeling when he starts a piece — and the answer was: none of the above.

“So where does that stuff come from?” I asked.

“It’s coming from thousands of years, it’s coming from everybody that ever came before me. It comes from every memory, it’s coming from places I don’t even know. That’s the whole thing, that’s what Hafftka told me. He said, ‘You don’t always know what’s coming through, you just have to do it.’”

Even so, once a piece is finished, Johnson happily talks about how ideas, memory, history, and imagery may have come together at the end of his brush. Rabbits appear in many of his paintings, and he said that’s a nod to having seen a lot of them where he lived as a child. The cartoonish depictions render them endearing but also distant or even alien, as if they occupy some liminal zone you can peer into but not visit.

When one person at the reception asked about the swirl of color and chaos in one of the largest paintings, Rabbits Unhinged, he replied:

“I think it stems from the Middle Passage, from Black bodies being chained together, so close, and the renegotiation of yourself as a human that you have to make,” he said. “And then they come out of the Middle Passage and they get to the plantation and all these different iterations. DuBois calls them ‘matrixes.’ We got the slave ship, we got the plantation, then post-plantation, then prisons, right? All that created jazz. It pushed people into a new sonic dimension that had never been seen before. You’re talking about the oldest music in Africa, filtering through the hold of that ship, and you come out with jazz, and you get this,” he said, pointing to the painting.

The show’s title “goes back to the hold of the ship,” he continued. “Black folks got Christian religion at the end of a whip, right? Right now, I think I’m in a state of throwing out things that don’t work and keeping things that do work, recognizing that it was a very specific apparatus where I got the understanding of God from … it all comes from an understanding of God in a very toxic context and breaking out of that fairy tale.”

Johnson is a busy man, splitting his time among Oregon, Washington, and California. On top of teaching, he has three shows out in the wild: Toxic Gods in McMinnville, another in Seattle, and a third in the the Mary Stuart Rogers Music Center at Willamette University. The Blackest Place I Know may be seen there through May 18. He’ll give a talk at noon Wednesday, March 12, in the Rogers Gallery at the Salem school.

When I visited Johnson in his Salem office, there were paintings all about, but he quickly noted that these belonged to his students. “Space is always a challenge for every artist, no matter where they are, so I just said, ‘Yeah, you can put these in here.’” Which reminded him of one of the students, a law major who discovered he loved to paint.

“This big one, this is one he did this semester, and it’s one of those things where he just got lost in it, which is what’s supposed to happen. He came to study law, and then he was in my intro class last semester.” Johnson doesn’t recall exactly what he said to the student that lit the fire, but it inspired the youth to knock out nearly 50 pieces on top of his regular class work.

“That’s what happens,” Johnson smiled. “You meet art at the right time, the right place, and an explosion happens inside of you. You’re obsessed, and you can’t think of anything else, you can’t do anything else. It happens with clay, it happens with paintings, it happens with drawing.”

I asked him, what would you like the public to know about artists that they don’t know?

“That there is magic in the work when you do it, but there’s no magical trick to approaching it,” he said. “There’s magic that happens all the time with art, magic that happens because the canvas is a portal, it opens stuff up. Anyone can engage in it. Anyone can say, ‘I can be an artist,’ and start that journey.”

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Toxic Gods & Black Fairy Tales is sponsored by the Lacroute Art Series and Linfield’s art department. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays. To reach the gallery from Oregon 99W, turn east on Keck Drive, which runs by the Albertsons on the south end of town, then turn right at the first street onto Library Court. The James F. Miller Fine Arts Center is the second building on the left.