The Strange Physics of the Human Figure
Miles Johnston builds impossible images from one of art’s most familiar subjects: the human body. Working primarily in graphite and oils, the British artist and illustrator transforms figures through fragmentation, repetition, division, folding, and distortion. Faces retreat into themselves, bodies separate along improbable boundaries, and recognizable anatomy becomes subject to unfamiliar physical rules. Beneath these surreal constructions lies a persistent concern with psychological experience. Johnston uses the figure to process what he describes as the intensity and profound strangeness of collective human existence, giving internal states a visible, bodily presence.
That fascination with unfamiliarity reaches back to childhood. Born in the United Kingdom in 1993, Johnston spent several of his earliest years in Brunei on the island of Borneo before later living in Hampshire, England. The contrast between environments left him with an early intuition that there was no single true “normal.” He became interested in experiences and disciplines that could disrupt ordinary perception, including mathematics, physics, philosophy, and art. Behind these interests was a desire to encounter the everyday afresh and to understand the sublime, frightening, awe inspiring strangeness he sensed in existence.
Drawing provided an increasingly focused way to pursue those questions. Johnston grew up in a creative household and initially copied characters from video games, discovering both the pleasure of improving technically and the possibility of making art professionally. During his teenage years, he became absorbed in online art forums at a moment when concept artists and illustrators were sharing work and knowledge with unusually active communities. He participated for roughly five years, learning from artists who emphasized drawing from imagination. By seventeen, he was already working professionally, but another stage of his education would soon reshape how he approached the figure.
Miles Johnston: Realism as a Foundation for the Impossible
At eighteen, Johnston moved to Sweden to study at the Swedish Academy of Realist Art. If online forums had encouraged him to invent, the academy demanded close observation and technical discipline. Classical drawing and painting gave him a rigorous understanding of anatomy, volume, light, and material presence. He later spent seven years teaching at the academy, an experience that deepened his relationship with realist technique. Rather than choosing between imaginative drawing and academic training, Johnston gradually fused the two traditions into the practice that defines his work.
That combination explains much of the persuasive power of his imagery. Johnston may divide a body into layers, multiply a figure, open impossible spaces inside a head, or bend anatomy according to invented forces, yet the transformation retains a convincing physical presence. Realism establishes credibility before the image breaks its rules. Graphite is particularly effective for this purpose because its controlled tonal range lets Johnston move from carefully modeled anatomy into mutation or dissolution without an abrupt visual break. His oil paintings extend similar concerns through color while maintaining the sense of weight and volume developed through classical study.
For Johnston, technical ability is not an end in itself. It supplies a language precise enough to make subjective experience appear almost tangible. Instead of presenting emotion through conventional symbols, he asks what an internal condition might look like if it physically altered a person. Figures become divided, hollowed, stretched, repeated, folded, or absorbed into one another. The body can act as architecture, boundary, container, or landscape for psychological events. The resulting image remains recognizably human while its impossible construction opens another way of thinking about memory, conflict, introspection, identity, and changing states of consciousness.
Drawing Without Knowing the Destination
Johnston’s images do not necessarily begin with a fixed story. Visual curiosity often comes first. An unusual distortion or formal possibility can provide the initial spark, after which he follows the questions generated by the image itself. If a body is divided, for example, he must decide whether its interior should appear solid or hollow. A transformation raises further problems concerning edges, thickness, eyes, space, and the behavior of light. An invented effect becomes convincing through a chain of decisions that gradually establishes its own visual logic.
This process is closely connected to Johnston’s understanding of artistic individuality. Every drawing presents numerous problems, and each solution offers an opportunity for personal intention. Two artists might begin from a similar premise yet make entirely different choices about structure, atmosphere, anatomy, or spatial behavior. For Johnston, those accumulated decisions are central to what makes a body of work identifiable. His precision therefore serves imagination rather than restricting it. Technical knowledge allows him to take an implausible idea seriously enough that the viewer can temporarily accept its internal rules.
The approach also informs his teaching. Johnston describes his current method as a meeting point between the imaginative drawing he encountered during his teenage years and the classical discipline he absorbed in Sweden. He is interested in developing original images from a blank page and, at times, a blank mind rather than merely executing a fully determined concept. Surprise is essential to that process. One of the responses he most values hearing in workshops is, “I didn’t realize I had this drawing waiting to come out.” Creative discovery, in this sense, depends not only on acquiring control but on leaving enough space for an image to become something its maker did not completely anticipate.
Miles Johnston: Transformation Without a Fixed Answer
Transformation provides the central mechanism through which Johnston turns psychological questions into images. His ongoing Transformation series is organized around the concepts Deform, Divide, Attract, and Recur, terms that correspond to recurring operations throughout his practice. Bodies alter their shape, separate, interact with forces or other figures, and return in multiplied or changed forms. These interventions allow a person to appear singular and multiple at once, outwardly present while psychologically elsewhere. Johnston is less interested in straightforward portraiture than in the unstable distance between external appearance and internal experience.
His influences place this approach within a wider history of technically accomplished imaginative art. Johnston has cited M. C. Escher, Zdzisław Beksiński, Takato Yamamoto, and Ernst Fuchs, artists associated in different ways with impossible structures, psychological intensity, invented spaces, and transformed forms. Johnston’s work, however, repeatedly returns to the body as its primary visual language. The familiarity of a face, torso, or gesture gives the viewer an immediate point of recognition. Altering that familiar structure then makes ordinary perception uncertain, creating images that can suggest dreams or mental experience without requiring a single prescribed interpretation.
That openness matters to Johnston. He has observed that figures studied and represented intensely can begin to acquire a surprising sense of autonomy, almost as though they exist independently within the fictional conditions of the picture. In one work, he considered a figure who simultaneously looked outward toward the viewer and inward toward her own imagined existence, complicating the boundary between observer, image, and character. His first solo exhibition, Interoception, held at Last Rites Gallery in New York in 2018 after group exhibitions in Australia and the United States, similarly reflected his enduring attention to internal experience. Yet he resists closing that experience with definitive explanations. Art, for Johnston, gains its life through what happens between the work and another person. His position remains deliberately generous: “My work means whatever it means to you.”
