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'HOW IT IS.' In one of Helen Johnson's recent paintings, a young woman is seated on a modernist chair with her back turned to us, shoulder-length dark hair swinging, as she slowly unpicks these words painted on a wall. Our eye is pulled from the graphic typeface to the girl's pale pink jumper - perhaps Angora - before descending to the delicate flakes of paint on the floor. The words and font in question refer to the first edition of Samuel Beckett's 1964 prose work, and the picture would seem to be a self-portrait of the young Melbourne artist. Beckett's radical pessimism was ingrained in his words. Johnson's tools are just as prosaic. Employing the medium of wall and paper painting for the subject of subtle subversion, Johnson's are the prettiest of protest paintings. In this way, How it is (Slowly becoming changed), 2007, illustrates 'the idea that you can pick away very slowly at the status quo.'
 
 
This work was part of a recent exhibition at Melbourne's Sutton Gallery, 'Do not go gentle into that goodnight', but also part of a growing body of work that - to use an environmental slogan - thinks local, acts global. Much of 'Do not go gentle...' was created in Dortmund, Germany, where the artist spent five months earlier this year. From a young man dreaming of being the astronaut Neil Armstrong, to art crowds milling at Vernissage, it drew from a variety of sources, seemingly unconnected, that Johnson assiduously assimilated through acrylic paint and pencil. As Nick Heron points out in an essay accompanying the Melbourne exhibition, 'The creative artist, today, can only be a collector of images, which are gathered from the recent as from the remote past, from personal as from collective memory, like spoils.'

 
This article appears in excerpted form.  You can read the article in its entirety in the Summer 2007 issue of Art & Australia.