"Deconstructed Lyre. sold" Painting

Johnston was Born in 1987 in Co. Down, graduating with a BA in Fine and Applied Arts from University of Ulster in 2010. Johnston paints full-time and has won The De Veres Art Award and the Towry Award- best from Northern Ireland at the NOAC.
He has exhibited work in Belfast, Dublin, London, including the Saatchi Gallery, Paris and Australia.
His inspiration comes from the poetry of everyday life, contemporary artists such as
Michael Borremans, David Kassan and Alyssa Monks. Old masters including Rembrandt, Turner
and Caravaggio, as well as the obvious surrealists Dali and Magritte also provide inspiration.

Johnston’s work explores the relationship between everyday objects and the figure.
He does this by juxtaposing the figure, inanimate objects and different surrounding contexts. Johnston’s body of work is a continual experimentation of this concept, putting the focus back onto things that might ordinarily have been overlooked. The quirky manner in which he pulls and twists narratives, highlighted by the realistic nature of his work, sheds light on the camouflaged absurdities hiding in plain sight. Johnston invites the viewer to dig through the layers of mundane normality with the shovel of imagination to unearth new perspectives.