Amanda Johnson Gallery

Amanda Johnson is a Key West painter who came to the island by a long route. Born in northern Wisconsin, she lived and studied in New York, Paris, Prague and India, took her fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, and in 2008 studied with realist painters at the Art Students League of New York and at the Palette & Chisel Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, where she started working with chiaroscuro. Her first solo show was at Palette & Chisel in February 2009.

She works in oil, both in the studio and in the open air, and calls herself an impressionist, though the paintings are closer to realist treatments of abstract subject matter. The recurring bodies of work are a Gold Leaf series, a Sunset collection and a Rooster collection, the last of which will make sense to anyone who has spent five minutes walking Old Town. The work is available as originals, as embellished giclée on canvas, and as archival cotton paper prints.

Johnson opened her own Key West gallery in 2012 and has taught oil painting locally at Florida Keys Community College. Her work is now carried by Procaccini Galleries, which means that in Key West it hangs at Art On Duval at 602 Duval Street, with the company's other rooms in Naples and Sarasota.

She paints live at each of those galleries on scheduled show weekends through the year, Memorial Day weekend being the Key West one, so her calendar is the thing to check if you want to watch a painting happen rather than just look at a finished one.