User:AliMcJ

Alison McMahon Johnson, artist and educator. Love it when my day job is teaching art; more commonly it is teaching ESL, which I also love to do: I love the students.

196-piece tile mural entitled "Time and Tide" installed in the Bayshore Branch Library, Belmont Shores, Long Beach, California 1979 as a part of the ground-breaking Artists in Residence Program sponsored by the Long Beach Recreation Department and the CETA program.

Master's Thesis and Project, 1977, was ten watercolor paintings entitled "Backgrounds," portraits of artists and friends at home, where they usually sat, surrounded by items in usual places, reflective of each individual's inner character (except for the first portrait, a dual one, which was reflective of a certain emptiness, long suspected and not fully realized until some ten-plus years later.

Exhibited in the First Women's Caucus for the Arts at Otis Art Institute (under new name now).

After working as an artist in residence, moved to Taipei, Taiwan, got married to Jim LaFortune, and lived and painted and taught English there for ten years, finding great fulfillment in my paintings and subject matter, carrying on a theme from Long Beach: portraits of public buildings (in downtown Long Beach, it was the old WWII Navy bars with South Pacific names). The first series done in Taiwan was a two-year series of eight still lifes composed of items found there, usually including a seasonal fruit, each painting representing a season of the year spent there, painted during that season. The second series was entitled "Mien," meaning both physical and metaphorical "Face" in Chinese, the sound meaning "Noodles" in Chinese, and, in English, surroundings and/or ambience: paintings of public streets and people and street signs (another sort of face).

Exhibited work from the US and Taiwan in a one-man show at the National Museum of History in Taipei and then was sent by the Government Information Office to exhibit "Mien" in Los Angeles and New York. After five years there, left husband, joined China Hash House Harriers and began to see, on foot, through Cross-country running, marvelous examples of Chinese domestic architecture in the countryside, which expanded into a body of work founded upon two watercolors I had painted in order to save the buildings, in painting, on paper, and titled the series "Endangered Species," a wholly fulfilling activity.

Taught Art -- Life Drawing and Design -- at the University of Redlands for two years and Art to grades 1-6 in a one-room schoolhouse in Angelus Oaks, California concurrently and until the original teacher was replaced by a secretary moving up in the district. Go figure: that's the educational bureaucracy for you. Dedicated teachers make the public school administration nervous. IMHO: seen it first hand.

Worked at San Bernardino Valley College for four years tutoring and eventually teaching English part-time there: another very fulfilling job. Moved to Los Angeles after getting married to Markal J. Johnson and taught a k-1 Vietnamese and Spanish-speaking combo in Westminster, followed by teaching ESL to actors and others in the entertainment industry for the next three years at Theatre of Arts in Hollywood, California, interrupted by a medical emergency and then a move to Texas, or Limbo, where I am currently living and trying to get back to Hermosa Beach, where I will pick back up my series of house portraits and endangered architecture: the wooden beach bungalow on a large lot.

http://AliMcJ.tripod.com

Father, Robert James McMahon, painter, printmaker, and aerospace engineer who worked on Pioneer and Voyager, which performed above and beyond expectations, sending back information for many years. Before moving into Aviation and Aerospace, Robert J. McMahon achieved a B.A. in Chemistry and an M.A. in Painting at the University of Iowa. His Master's Thesis and project was a series of fluorescent paintings and a stairway mural (since painted over) at the University: the paintings are all invisible (i.e. creamish and lime-ish white brushstrokes are visible, as in a white-on-white) in any light but "blacklight," the term now applied to what was then fluorescent light. In printmaking, Robert J. McMahon became one of the few artists who applied themselves to copper engraving (today, as in the 1950s, etching is more commonly used for intaglio printing than is engraving, a difficult technique once used for printing currency and stamps), and had a color engraving, "Night Flight" purchased for the permanent collection of the Library of Congress.

Mother, Bernice G. McMahon (1917-2009), Journalist, Author, Educator, Actress, and mother without parallel. Wrote travel and lifestyle pieces for periodicals, monologues for Samuel French, acted in Community Theatre, Manhattan Playhouse (run by Don Gish, nephew of the Gish sisters of silent film), and appearances on television's "Traffic Court," leaving me to explain for years afterward, "No, my mom didn't get drunk and abducted by aliens. Somebody did, but not my mom: she acted that part for television."