Alison McMahon, Artist Extraordinaire

"Never insult an artist: he might make you immortal."
--Evelyn Waugh (?)
"...and certainly never, never, never insult someone who's an artist and a web page builder who also has access to Adobe Photoshop, a scanner, and your photograph."
--the fabulous Alison McMahon Johnson
For images, please go to Ali's McArchives
which was cited as a Notable Web Site in the 11/17/98 Asian Wall Street Journal

Please see the tile mural installed in Bayshore Branch Library, Long Beach, California (Second and Bayshore) in 1979 as part of the Long Beach CETA Public Works of Art Project. It is titled "Time and Tide, or The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts." Please go see it in person: the linked photo here (even though I took it myself) doesn't do it justice. It's a 196-piece tile mural of the water surfaces of Marine Stadium over a 9-month period; each tile is individually hand-painted and fired and shows the high or low tide from the day it was painted. You can ride the lunar tides visually through this piece, as the periods of higher high tides and lower low tides are the full and new moons throughout the year and so are seen at regular intervals throughout the piece. It is a graphic study of time. One of the preliminary watercolor panels, "Time and Tide VI," is on display on a page of water imagery in the McArchives.

Recent appearances in the print media: a brief artist's bio and description of the "Time and Tide" mural are in the 1998 edition of Robin Dunitz' Street Gallery (p. 81 & 55)and at the L.A. Mural Conservancy web site; Animal Spirits reprinted in Lynn Johnston's Remembering Farley, 1996 (p. 165)

This page was awarded
"Website of the Week"
in the Hermosa Beach Easy Reader 12 June 1997.

Click here to view photos of "Sunset on the Empire" last March.

Master's Thesis, "Backgrounds:" on file at California State University at Long Beach. The project consists of watercolors of ten people sitting in their favorite spots in their homes, the objects around them reflecting their inner makeup, including the astrological influences on character of the four elements. The portraits are a small part of what Little Richard calls "God's Bouquet"

Even older than that, I'll put it up sometime, is the 1969 Fugs' album cover I did for Warner Brothers: "The Belle of Avenue A:" an early excursion into the field of tasteful vulgarity. This is an album cover done for an east coast cult band (you know, those people who didn't think there was any culture west of the Hudson) by a beach kid (you know, one of those people who didn't think there was any life east of Pacific Coast Highway).

"East is west and west is east and Rudyard Kipling never met Hello Kitty--"
--Bill Griffith, Are We Having Fun Yet?, p. 104
...nor had he met Alison McMahon nor the numerous people of that so-called bland Generation X (sometime I'll put on that other hat and put my treatise on Pluto as a generational influence out there) who have, thankfully, begun to inhabit the ghost town that is now the 60's...and 50's. Don't be fooled by alarmists in the media: there is hope for the future.

For my students:
Go toMrs. Johnson's Hot Links or Mrs. Johnson's Launch Pad (908A Photos)

Quote of the Week

"Preemptive boringness. Being one-dimensional is the most satisfying method of coping with out-of-control people--with any situation that's out of control. Keep your face like a screen-saver software program. Don't let people know the ideas you love, the games you've played, the places you've visited in your mind. Keep your treasure to yourself."
--Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet, p. 47 24 June - 26 June 1997; 3 July - 21 July 1997

Artist,
Itinerant English Teacher,
International Hash House Harrier,
and sometime film extra*
Watercolors a la prima, specializing in Architecture.
Greeting Cards, Postcards, Business Cards, Stationery
Altered photographs.
Printed Patches and T-shirts (specializing in Tasteful Vulgarity)
Proofreading and Editing.
Amazon Associate
M.A. Drawing and Painting, CSULB 1977