9

Don Johnson

Did you have any previous associations with this number?

No, not really.

So how did you go about making this piece?

I tried to research the importance of nine. I looked at the meaning of nine and a bunch of mythology and religion and stuff came up. I thought about going with the Norse religion because I’m Norwegian, but a lot of it seemed too narrative for the way I normally work.

Then I was just trying to think of other things relating to the number nine. I thought of: cats have nine lives. Nine planets. When I grew up there were nine planets anyway. I think there’s only eight now. So I started out with the background, there’s a bunch of cat silhouettes. And I made kind of a camo pattern, just overlapping nine different cats. You can’t see it in the finished product as much. And then I was gonna do nine rings around the center of the piece as well to represent the nine planets but I didn’t end up with that. I wanted to focus more on the shape and the mark making as well. I think I just tried to go more visual over conceptual.

Do you have any new thoughts about the number nine after doing this?

I try not to make anything too conceptual. I try to make things easily digestible. I think just making the mark 9 over and over and over again, it’s just kind of funny how your drawing or your writing changes from doing it so much. But the actual number itself, I don’t feel like I do. Maybe that’s because of my approach to keep it less conceptual.

I love the cats. I didn’t see them, but it’s good to know that they’re there.

Yeah, I was gonna try to do something All Cats, but I’m not really a cat person. I didn’t want to dedicate something to them.

Don Johnson is an artist who loves to play with shape, line, and layers. He earned a BA in Fine Art and Business at Augustana University, and a MFA in Fine Art at the University of Idaho. Don is currently a working artist in Denver, Colorado.