Voice of calm: Ben Johnson's haunting cityscapes (original) (raw)

When the herring gulls cease their wheeling across this silver-grey bend in the Thames, nothing, not even the tidal water, seems to move. Looking through the living-room windows of Ben and Sheila Johnson's riverside house is like looking at a very English painting, a quiet palette of muted colours blurring seamlessly into each other. It is a hushed scene utterly at peace with itself.

The house itself is a quiet architectural statement, an almost anonymous 1960s brick box designed by the late Michael Patrick, whose uncelebrated designs include a boat-house and a cricket pavilion for Eton College, a number of suburban factories and houses for Hertfordshire County Council. It forms a part of St Peter's Wharf, a colony of artists' studios sat comfortably and four-square on this most self-consciously artistic stretch of the Thames. Dotted along the riverside walk that winds west of Hammersmith Bridge are the former homes of William Morris, Eric Gill, Edward Johnston and JMW Turner, who painted sunrises here with or without sea-monsters. Drawing his last breath, Turner sat up from his pillow, gazed through the window and declared, "The sun is God."

There is no sun on a late winter morning, yet the grey and silver light reflecting off the river illuminates the all-white interior of the Johnsons' unpretentious home. It pries into each uncluttered corner of the ground- and top-floor studios. It probes gently into two small bedrooms, through two small bathrooms and casts a quietly revealing light on the few undemanding ornaments set in Patrick's original glass-backed and underlit shelves: an African stool, pebbles from a Dorset beach, some old wooden porridge bowls from Wales, a lifesize wooden lamb from a Norfolk butcher's shop and a curious garnering of wizened French apples carved with the faces of what appear to be evil hags. "The faces were beautiful once," says Johnson. "The idea is that they age as the apples decay. It got to the point where I didn't want them to age any more than they have, so I freeze-dried them."

There is nothing icy or freeze-dried about this home, yet it has a stillness that matches and mirrors Johnson's immaculately still paintings of interiors and cityscapes. Aside from the fact that St Peter's Wharf can only be lived in by working artists, this was a natural place for Johnson to settle. His studio - light, white and all-but spotless - is a few minutes walk away, although separated by the anything-but-quiet road that hurtles traffic between here and Heathrow.

Inside the studio, he has been preparing the latest of his acrylic-on-canvas paintings for Still Time, a new exhibition of his work. They are extraordinary things: minutely detailed designs; abstracts of architectural interiors that are themselves abstract; paintings inspired by the minimal interiors of John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin. At once substantial and ethereal, they fit the credo of Le Corbusier: "Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light."

"They're an attempt to find that still point in the turning world TS Eliot searches for in the Four Quartets," says Johnson. "I hope that doesn't sound pretentious, because I think it's something most of us search for in our more reflective moments. The paintings are about orientation and grounding, about a certain contentment you feel in an exact place at an exact time under exact light."

Remarkably, even Johnson's almost impossibly ambitious cityscapes of Hong Kong, Jerusalem and Zurich - canvases that take the artist and three assistants up to two years to paint - are objects of quiet contemplation. Nothing stirs in these paintings. They are free of people, of movement, of imperfection. They are almost religious in their intensity.

Johnson is a Buddhist, but doesn't shout about it. His paintings, studio, the house at St Peter's Wharf and the way he lives are quietly in accord with his deep-rooted beliefs. A charming, intelligent and funny man, he has ordered his world as if effortlessly.

Happily, Johnson's personal search for a form of perfection is nicely rattled by the details of his new home. "Sheila insists on carpets," he says as we climb up the tight, winding stairs that lead from ground- to top-floor studios. "I'd like wooden floors, but where I will never compromise in my work, I'm quite happy to do so at home. There are some things worth obsessing over and some that aren't."

The house that Michael Patrick built is full of small imperfections. "It's a working studio as well as home," says Johnson, pointing out the raw concrete ledges in the ground-floor studio and the factory-like windows. "It's not prissy. It is, I suppose, in the best sense, a machine for living in."

The furniture is the sort that the readers of Wallpaper* magazine might drool over - Eames, Gray, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Aalto - yet chairs and tables are well-worn: old favourites that the Johnsons have lived with for years.

"The house was meant to be part of a working community," says Johnson. "It was never meant to be luxurious or super-stylish. I like the fact that there is a communal laundry. It's not used any more, but the idea is attractive. Today, everyone has their own washing machines, although it's hard to find the right place to put one. Patrick designed generously with space and light, but the thought of artists worrying about their own washing machines and the daily intricacies of their laundry wouldn't, I suspect, have entered his head."

Home, here at St Peter's Wharf, is not about domestic mundanities. It is an artistic venture

Still Time, an exhibition of Ben Johnson's work, is at Blains Fine Art, 23 Bruton Street, London W1 until April 13. Details on 020-7495 5050.