Marius Johnston
Bio
Born in Boston, MA in 1941, Marius Johnston grew up in Hingham, a small town on Boston’s South Shore and attended boarding school in New England. In the mid- 1960’s, while studying psychology at Northeastern University, he took up painting of large abstracts on canvas. In 1969, Marius moved to Berkeley, CA, where at the height of the rock poster era he founded Rainbow Zenith Press, a commercial offset printing shop and graphic arts studio, and the site of the first printing of David Goines’s iconic “Rainbow Zenith” silver bi-plane poster. Rainbow Zenith Press gained the attention of many Bay Area artists, including the faculty of the printmaking department at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), who, after seeing Marius’s graphic arts work, awarded him a full tuition scholarship together with a position as a graduate teaching assistant. (One of the posters Marius designed and printed during this period (unsigned) is in the collection of the Oakland Museum.) Marius completed his MFA in printmaking in 1978, working primarily in silkscreen, but also continuing his painting, and experimenting with both collage and Polaroid photography. In the 1980’s, using the original MAC Plus and a primitive scanner, and utilizing techniques gleaned from offset printing, Marius began incorporating digitally altered imagery into his work. The resulting mixed media pieces have been shown nationally and internationally and have been featured in MACWeek and other publications including “The Verbum Book of Digital Painting,” Michael Gosney’s seminal documentation of the early computer art pioneers. From 1998 until 2002, Marius was the editor and web director for the Ylem Journal, a bi-monthly publication highlighting the intersection of art and technology. Marius’s current mixed media pieces on Arches watercolor paper combine painting and drawing with printed digital fragments, yielding images with a rare sense of mystery and restraint. In 2014, Marius moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Tucson, AZ, his wife’s childhood hometown. His studio is at his home in the old Catalina Foothills.