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NOSTALGIA FOR LEMURIA
1961
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From these sketchbooks, the drummels then began to invade his paintings. During Johfra’s life with Diana, these humorous and bizarre reconfigurations of human anatomy became the dominant theme. The organic growths of his earlier interior landscapes had undergone a transformation. While the coralline textures and fungus growths moved into the background of his painting, the drummels now advanced into the foreground.
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SPRING MORNING
1957
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THE LONESOME LIFE
1961
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(Click on any image to enlarge)
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Which is to say, Johfra became more obsessed with organic growth as manifest in human and animal forms, rather than the earlier plant and mineral kinds. The substance of his imagination had now acquired eyes to see, hands to grasp, and mouths to gape, kiss, or devour.
However, it should be stressed that the pure ‘Mindstuff Landscapes’ also persisted during this time. Though the drummel was the major evolution in subject matter, his interior landscapes also showed a slow but remarkable advance in the rendering of mineral and vegetal forms - here appearing like petrified wood, there like frozen ice, or elsewhere as liquid crystal.
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