Painting by Johan Andersson.

Johan and I go back 14 years to when I spotted his work at Central Snt Martins College Of Art. I was given a tour of the art school and of the hundreds of students creating and showcasing their work I spotted Johan’s painting, I shook his hand and I knew 'that guy is going places.' When I discovered NFT art, I immediatley thought of Johan and how much he was about to completely blow up this space. His work not only involves extremely clever iconography from pop culture, he's a brilliant painter, one of the top few young artists I've ever come across and consistently been blown away by everything he comes out with.

When I walked into his gallery Art Unified in Abbot Kinney over the weekend Money Talks stared back at me. It whispered deeply behind the dollar bill covering its mouth, saying everything our time and this movement stands for. I knew it was about to move millions of people. Shakespeare's words whispered back “If Money go before, all ways do lie open.” This collaboration here, now, it's inevitable, it's iconic, it's the face of the new wave.

In 2016 I wrote this article about Johan's work:

"Have we plateaued the potential for popular culture to extend beyond a greater refinement of formula, and are merely emulating the successes of our ancestors, if the movie studios are anything to go by with their endless reboots this could well be the case? Or is the eclecticism of post-modernism such an unstoppable monster with the advent of the internet, that we find ourselves in the cultural swamp of randomness? Does any of it matter to the individual who seeks to speak with feeling through the language of art to the best version of himself to another?

It seems we are faced with increasing divisions in the West, that in one sense allow for greater individuality then ever before and yet what we give up is any sense of unity. In researching a film about my father this last two years, I looked back at the revolutionary 60s and how far away from that united utopia they envisioned we now find ourselves. It could be said that this idea of connectedness is just an illusion and what politicians are all fighting for is a feeling that rests beneath all their rhetoric. What we all really want to end the impenetrable loneliness that we are born with, this strange feeling that others walk with us yet are never there, that is fleetingly resolved in moments of realizing our own fragility in the face of another and being met with a smile and hand on ones shoulder. Or to stand with courage in service of something larger than ourselves that we can with confidence give over to. Or as a creator, bare the weight of humanities loneliness for that period of creation to reveal our gift at the end of it all and speak with something greater than language could ever hope to compensate for.

I first saw Johan Anderson's work in 2007 after recently having graduated in Classical Theatre from Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. I was being guided by a conceptual artist, as she took me through the halls of Central Saint Martin's School of Art, I believe the project she was working on at the time was letting balloons go on the rooftop of the college and filming it. There was another melting candle wax into a wooden box, one of the students mumbled something about Ways Of Seeing. Much of the art she was showing me didn't exist. I wandered through the halls mostly uninterested. Until something happened, I encountered Johan Andersson painting "Randie", as I stopped staring into the portrait flashes of old master painters came flooding into my consciousness, from Rembrandt to Freud to Peter Howson. I was overcome by the humanity emanating from the canvas, more human than human, the presence of sentience.

detailed the experience in Art Influence which was run at the time by the Peter Fuller Memorial Foundation now represented in this blog, it was my first published essay on art. I only corresponded with Johan via email and very briefly during that time. Subsequently our journeys diverged as I went into British theatre and independent films. I remember getting on the tube to rehearsals for my first West End show at Trafalgar Studios Madness In Valencia, script in hand as I stepped up to the platform and looked across the tracks it was unmistakably the same hand of Johan Andersson's striking me again with that same distinct feeling.

Crossing the pond to Los Angeles without knowing he was out here I encountered Johan again at the Los Angeles Art Fair, as a line of people sued up around the block to experience The Last Supper. It's no secret the affinity my father felt for Ruskin, what he connected to was the spiritual outlook directed towards nature and art. Though Ruskin's relationship with Christianity was a source of disillusion for him, as it was for Peter, as he battled his father on religious matters his entire life. But it was never the institution that he sort out, it was the deeper purpose of what a religion meant to people. He would often make the point that art now stood a chance to stand in place of the shattered shared symbolic order that a religion once provided."