"Johnston views life as a complexity. He doesn’t hide from life’s brutal truths. At the same time, he neither wallows in self-indulgent cynicism nor embraces ugliness for its shock value or for its own sake. He takes in the beauty and the truth of life along with the lies and the perversions, the joy, anguish, acts of betrayal and kindness. …Johnston ruminates upon the great bewildering human morass, then with effort and some grief, he transforms this raw matter into an object of beauty to …make the harsh world more comprehensible and sometimes even fill it with grace.”
– American Arts Quarterly magazine,
Spring 2001
“What Barry Johnston calls his, ‘search for human meaning in an increasingly mechanized world,’ touches us because it expresses the universally human search for meaning in our persistently abstract and complex modern world.”
~ Steve Mirabella, art critic
