Kevin Johnson, AKA Cool Kev, is a fixture in this city. He’s the living embodiment of taking life as it comes, living to the hilt, and reflecting the shine that Richmond beams down on us. Like most mirrors in the sun, he can be a bit much, but when all is dark, he lights up the room. It’s hard to separate the artist from the art, and in this case I’m not even going to attempt to. In this case, to do so would be to lose the plot. Because from one, you’ll understand the other better.
In the 20-plus years I’ve known him, he has been an indefatigable force in the circles I’ve run in. From his presence in Richmond’s nascent hip-hop scene in the early to mid-2000s (under the name Oxen Johnson with Luggage) to his Lebowski-style presence when a poolside hang and a blunt are in order, he can be understated. His paintings, from the earliest collage work to his recent collection of mixed media inspirations evoking fashion, graffiti, chaos, and nostalgia, tie together his enduring legacy as one of the city’s most colorful characters, generous homies, and hilarious individuals I’ve ever met.
He has been working on a new collection of paintings that will go on display at our mutual friend Amy Cabaniss’ newest restaurant / bar Revel, in Lakeside this Saturday at 7PM.
Christian Detres: Kevin Randolph Johnson. You’ve been a staple in the city for a long time. You’re not an unknown quantity but I don’t know that many people who can accurately describe where you’re coming from. Tell us a little bit about how you came up. How’d you wind up in Richmond? What has your experience been like here?
Kevin Johnson: I’m from Lynchburg, Virginia. For people that don’t know, it’s probably one of the most conservative cities in America. The arts were definitely not pushed by any means. I barely had an art class in high school. I got expelled in 10th grade for a dime bag of weed. I finally did get to go to a school that had an art teacher named Mrs. Crane. She’s amazing.
CD: What school was that?
KJ: It was called New Vistas, a very small school for troubled kids. I had an art class that was about two hours a day in high school for my 10th-grade year, which was amazing. Then I left school and went to VCU. I did a couple of years of that—it didn’t work out. I was having too much fun, so I started making music. I literally just spent five or six years of my life—maybe seven or eight—doing some rap group called Luggage. My name was Oxen Johnson. I worked with a lot of really talented artists. That was really fun while it lasted. I really enjoyed being in the studio more than I enjoyed being on stage. The creative process was what I loved most. After that, I kind of slowed down because rap especially has a shelf life. I kind of just really didn’t do much. I traveled. I moved to a couple of different cities.
CD: You spent time in LA, right?
KJ: Yes, just before I started doing this, I was out in LA for about a year. I also lived in New York here and there for short stints, just doing what I wanted to do, which was party, hang out, and go to bars. Back in about 2013, one of my best friends passed away in Alaska. He was an Alaskan fisherman, and that kind of paused my good time. I had to get my shit together and help out with the family. I was just doing a lot of drugs, drinking, and partying and didn’t really have much to do except for just sleeping in and going out. One day, my buddy, my best friend Thomas Fields, brought me all of his art supplies. He just opened my door and said, “Here. Take these.” So I just started doing something. So, Thomas, thank you for that.
I didn’t have any paint. All I had was scissors and glue. I had paint, actually, but I didn’t know how to paint. I still will say that I don’t know how to paint, but that’s just me being too hard on myself. I started just doing strictly collages. I did that for about six months before I had any interest in sharing my work. When I finally did post to Instagram, when I finally thought I made something that was cool… you know how social media works. I started getting a little feedback. From there, I was like, “Alright, if I’m going to be serious about this, I have to put in at least 40 hours a week.” I think anyone needs to do that with their craft, especially during the learning process of what they want to do. Over the next 10 to 12 years, I’ve kind of shaped my craft into what it is now, which I would call straight-up mixed media visual art—70% collage and then painting on top. It’s been really fun, and I’ve been really happy with the way my peers and clients have reacted to my artwork.
CD: All right. So, you get to the point where you’re starting to feel yourself with your artwork, people are giving great feedback and everything. You put together a collection. Where did your moves take you from there?
KJ: The first collage pieces that I did, I would spend 60 to 70 hours on. I always knew this was important to me. I always knew that I wanted to do bigger artwork, larger scale artwork. Most of my stuff starts at three by three feet and can go all the way up to eight by eight feet. The biggest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t compete with muralists because I cannot use spray paint. I’m terrible at it. I do not know how to do it, and I prefer just working inside on a panel, honestly. I really fell in love with high fashion and occult symbolism—things that pique your interest as soon as you look at them. Bold images. I started adding those kinds of things to my panels. I taught myself how to do portraits. I taught myself how to do landscapes. I taught myself how to do illustration. I spend a lot of my time at Kinkos printing images I’ve found for layering into my artwork.
CD: Yeah, I remember you had stacks and stacks and stacks of old magazines and newspapers at your old place. It was looking a little hoarder-ish for a minute, but I got it as soon as I saw your first collection.
KJ: You know, I make jackets and clothes too. So sometimes I’ll get like fabric material when I do these bulk orders on eBay. That was later on down the line, but I’ve definitely made about maybe 30 or 40 jackets so far as well. Once I started learning how to do portraits, and kind of just fell into my niche, I decided to buy a printer that I can use at home whenever I wanted. Most of my work comes from not being able to stop thinking at four in the morning. Now I can go straight to my printer, print out that inspiration, and apply it to a painting and leave it there. Let it dry and then come back to it later. I’m typically working on three or four or five paintings at a time. Three or four ideas at a time.
CD: You have an interesting story surrounding your first show in New York. Tell everybody about that.
KJ: My first gallery show was in the Lower East Side in Manhattan. It was at Celeste “Isabel” Dawson’s loft on E 13th St. Rosario Dawson‘s mother. This was the building where Rosario grew up (ed. note: and where she was discovered during the casting of KIDS). Celeste had the top floor. I did that show with a bunch of other interesting artists, yourself included. That gave me the push that I needed. Rosario was kind enough to take some photos in front of some of my artwork, which really kind of gave some credibility to my work.
That was about five or six years ago. Ever since then, I’ve preferred to do restaurant shows. I’ll explain. I like to keep my art affordable. I don’t mind paying galleries at all, but restaurants attract people from all walks of life, not just art collectors. I make my work affordable. I typically sell most of the artwork that I put up in restaurant shows. Those opening events are not so much wine and somebody on a piano. It’s more like a DJ and a bunch of my peers and friends out having a good time. So I might not make as much money as a gallery would bring me, but I typically sell more than people do on opening night. It’s also more fun that way. So it kind of all evens out.
CD: I love your work. You know that. They’re the kind of things that people stop and stare at for a long time. People get lost in them. I’ve never had a guest in my home that doesn’t spend at least a minute gazing into the deep, almost fractal, level of detail in them. I’ll still stop to look at them and I’ll see something new that I hadn’t seen before. I’ll connect to things in them that I had never connected before. There’s a lot of deep symbolism wrapped in seeming chaos.
I have a good amount of your earlier collage-heavy work. Not that you still don’t use collage, you do, but you’ve transitioned a lot more into using drippy paint for the emotive aspects, even cryptic text. Can you speak to the high fashion and occult symbolism you mentioned earlier?
KJ: I found that people respond well to the high fashion logos I recreate in my artwork in general. I spent a lot of time in LA and in New York. I would go down to 5th Avenue, to the flagship stores. I’d go into the Gucci store and look around and be like, “no way I can afford any of this”, then go to the top floor, the inner sanctum, which is all white. You have to wear white gloves, even to go around and touch the garments.
CD: Like a temple to exclusivity.
KJ: I got the idea to utilize these near religious icons on stuff that people can put up in their houses. It has a quasi-religious patina. They can hopefully get the same feeling as they do when they do see high fashion in situ. I love not so much the fashion itself but just the symbolism, the way people admire the concept. It’s iconography. Even the branded patterns sans logos, stuff like that. With commissions, I’ll ask someone, “Hey, give me two or three of your favorite high fashion brands – or if it’s Reebok or Timberland, I don’t really care, like, I’ll put it in there.” I love it all. With occult symbolism, there’s just so much out there and people have been using it as art for thousands of years. It’s in our DNA for religiosity to be eye popping. To be visually engrossing. I do tend to layer things into the background of things, which is also a foundation of the hermetic and alchemic traditions. They can be something as simple as a word, a picture, an animal or loved one. I’ll layer an abstraction overtop of it – where you can barely see it unless I pointed it out.
CD: I’ve been lucky enough to have you take me through the paces of some of the pieces I own. It’s really fascinating to have the esoteric niches explained. Like having arcane scripture illuminated for you. The appreciation for them just gets deeper and deeper with each view and the explanations are definitely worth sticking around for. The stories are great.
KJ: Every single painting in this weekends’ show is of a series tied in to itself. There’s about 12 or 13 pieces ranging from 7’x 5’ to about 36” x 24”. They all have a similar theme. I’ve been inspired by the Hermes Birkin bags. They’re insanely expensive. They’re up to $350,000. Ha, we can get a little bit of that life on your walls whether you’re rich or poor.
CD: I’ve always taken some of your fashion iconography in the settings in which you put them, as ambiguous as to whether or not it’s being lauded or being mocked.
KJ: Very well put. That ambiguity is there intentionally. Sometimes you’ll find things that are more or less like, “oh, I kind of see where he’s going with this” and how ridiculous it can be sometimes, but also comes from the natural instinct to want to have things that are worth something, and to be worth something. To wear garments that will make you stand out. I understand that, especially in the way that I dress personally. I’m really into fashion in general, but I would call it just low-scale fashion.
CD: I think there’s an attenuation coefficient that’s lost on anybody that knows you. You’re a big personality that leads people to think you leave everything on your sleeve. What they’re missing is what doesn’t make its way to your surface. The bottom 90% of the iceberg. When you dive a little deeper into your paintings, to there’s a competence in composition and a reducible scale. You can stand back from a lot of these pieces, especially the larger pieces – stand back far, far enough from them to get the harmony of composition, which I think is pleasing to the eye. But when you’re nearly nose to canvas, you start noticing some tiny little scrap of an image, cut out from an old Life Magazine from the 1960, you know? Or something painfully beautiful winking at nostalgia, cropped from a Highlights children’s magazine.
KJ: I do like to evoke memory, and definitely childhood. Pretty much in all of my paintings. Yeah, I try to put something in there that will suddenly go oh, man, I remember that image, or I remember that book. I remember having that. I remember seeing that. I’ve always said if I ended up somewhere where there was nothing but trash around and glue, and suddenly for me to apply it to? I’m pretty confident that I can make a cool thing.
CD: I have literally seen you do that. You know, myself and another artist who I will be talking to later on this month, Monsieur Zahore, had a chance to hang out with you at his studio where you did exactly that. You just pasted whatever was on the floor on the wall to find a pleasing composition. Upon closer inspection it showed a narrative that you wouldn’t normally expect out of something that pastiche.
KJ: There’s a lot of unlikely ingredients in my work that I pull together, like I said, to that grander composition. If anyone’s ever interested in learning my process, feel free to DM me. I’ll be open as I can be about how to do everything from beginning to end. It’s a recipe that I learned myself for sure. But I have absolutely no problem sharing with any other artists out there.
CD: On another note that is not quite so deep, but still intriguing… Lots of people know you as Kev. Nobody calls you Kevin. Most people know you as Cool Kev. I know I can’t say the words without you, kind of like, shaking your head and laughing, because I understand how it comes across. Let’s lay it to rest once and for all. How did that come about?
KJ: I have no problem explaining that at all. I’ll be the first person to tell you that that nickname came about from myself. There was a comic book strip that I did, back in the early 2000s called The Adventures of Cool Kev and it was some very crudely drawn illustrations of just me, or a caricature of me, going around to maybe like a hippie commune, or going to space or whatever. It would always just end up with me just in some ridiculous antics. After I did about 10 or 20 of them, the nickname kind of stuck. And I wasn’t gonna tell anyone to not call me that.
CD: I mean, we’ve known each other for a very long time. I do remember somebody, the first time I was introduced to you, say “oh yeah, this is Cool Kev”. I was like “What? You call him that?” Maybe take this as a personal compliment, but you earned it.
KJ: When I hear it, it sounds weird to me too. You know, like, if I’m walking down the street somewhere, typically if it’s somebody I haven’t seen in a while, it’ll be like “Yo! Cool Kev!” and that’s when it’s like “oh yeah, that’s me.” I don’t have to worry that they’re talking about another Kevin.
CD: So let’s talk about the show coming up. This is at Amy Cabaniss’ new spot up in Lakeside, Revel, where you used to live? You lived in Lakeside for years. How did this show come together? And what are the basic elements of it?
KJ: Amy and I have been peers for quite a while. I’ve been a bartender in buildings that she’s owned and have been on both sides of the bar with her. We have always talked about doing something like this. She’s always been very supportive of my art, constantly telling me, “Hey, I really like your stuff.” It just came to fruition recently when she got this new restaurant, which is a beautiful space—brand new, with a big outside area. It gave me the space I needed to do the kind of show that I wanted to do, especially in a different market. I lived in Lakeside, got to know the neighborhood really well, and all my neighbors. I’m really excited to have something over there. Obviously, I want as many people from the city to come to the show, but I’m really looking forward to having a new audience over there.
We’ve got Soraya Silene of IONNA playing an acoustic set and DJing afterwards too. So that’s gonna be a cool night, and that’s from 7 to 10 PM on the 3rd, this Saturday. We might have some surprises there as well.
The price range for my pieces – for people that want to know – will be ranging from about $350 up to $1200. There’ll be one giant 7’ x 5’ piece that’ll probably be around $2500.
CD: Tell me about the raffle,
KJ: Oh yeah. The raffle will help pay for any entertainment, music, bartenders, anyone that helps out with the show. It’s $10 and you can get any painting from the whole entire show if you win. And we call it that night at 10 o’clock.
CD: Essentially this show is kind of a kickoff for you for your summer. You have a big adventure planned coming up. Tell us about that a little bit.
KJ: I’m planning on leaving shortly after the show. Mid-August, I will go to Amsterdam for about a month and a half. I’m taking my beloved dog Santana with me. I’m going to be in a gallery space with a couple other artists, putting together a show. I’m going out by myself. Some friends will be visiting though. That’s the big next step. It’s a little different because you’re just a ticket away from home but you’re on your own for weeks at a time. This will be a little bit different for me, so I’m really excited for it. I’m obviously a little nervous and anxious, but I’m happy to admit that. It’s a challenge for me and that’s why I’m really excited to go and try and get this done.
KEVIN JOHNSON PAST WORKS
