As the sun just begins to rise over San Francisco Bay and peer into her studio window, Susan Johnson stares into her unfinished painting, searching for the missing puzzle piece that’ll finish it off.
Her two loyal and incredibly friendly labradors, Dylan and Daphne, lay by her side, where they remain most of the time. The piece is almost done, she can feel it, but not quite yet.
“For me, it becomes like a puzzle and I’m trying to find that last piece,” said Johnson. “Once I find that, now I can complete it, because I know where it’s going. It’s almost like a math problem to me.”
In the current times of gentrification and rising rent prices, Johnson was forced to move out of her gallery in the Hunters Point neighborhood when the rent had tripled. But without fear nor shame, she moved all of her pieces from the gallery to the walls of her own home.
“Some of [the gentrification] is really bad; people are moving out because of lost studio space,” said Johnson. “But the dot-comers have a disposable income and they are willing to spend it on art. It’s a double-edged sword.”
On a Sunday afternoon in Golden Gate Park, Johnson sat calmly as spectators admired and bought some of her pieces. As a young and drunken skateboarder approached her asking how much a piece was, she ignored his inquisition, figuring him to just be a young punk.
“You think I don’t have any money,” the skateboarder said to her. To which she replied with a price nearly double the asking, never expecting him to say yes. And yet he did say yes, and slide his credit card before riding off with the painting on his skateboard.
“I looked him up the next day and it turns out he was a millionaire game designer from Silicon Valley,” Johnson said. “It’s astonishing, these young people. But who knows how long it will last.”
According to Johnson, that double-edged sword mindset is common among a lot of the other members of the San Francisco Artist Guild that she’s a part of.
“There’s two other groups in San Francisco, but we consider ourselves more fine art because we don’t do prints or photographs,” said Johnson on the guild. “The city doesn’t want us to be street artists.”
In fact, the guild has to renew a contract with the city every single year to approve of them selling art on Sundays around the city such as at Golden Gate Park and Washington Square Park, according to Johnson. The ability to sell her art in different ways rather than just a gallery has really broadened her customers, even to drunk millionaire skateboarders.
“Everyone has their own thing going on, but we sell as a group,” Johnson said. “We are in charge of our own destiny.”
Although many members of the guild make custom pieces for customers, Johnson is an abstract artist, and can never see how a piece is going to turn out when she starts it.
“I just kind of dive in, the composition emerges as I paint,” said Johnson as one of her pups growls for attention next to her. “Whatever you see in it is what you see.”
For her, it was always going to be abstract art. Even when she took a still life class in college, the professor told her, “yeah, this is not your thing.”
“The way I see things is a lot of color and shapes,” Johnson said on her artistic mind. “What I get out of art and painting is how you get from beginning to middle to end, and that feeling of elation when you get to there.”
Although without a gallery, Johnson is headstrong on keeping her career as an artist, finding inspiration in these changing times, and training Dylan and Daphne to behave themselves when guests arrive.