00018 · Rose Johnson

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I met Rose Johnson as she was being born.

She was doing a performance art piece at the Ice House in Phoenix. This was the 1990s, and Phoenix’s art scene was small, dozens of folks making art for each other and being completely ignored by the other millions of people in the Valley. It was bliss.

I was not yet friends with Rose, but I knew of her: the quirky British painter who gave everything in her life over to art. She was a dynamo of joyful creation, and once she hatched a project, saw it through with total commitment.

In this particular encounter, she was set up in one of the many rooms in the Ice House, which was a huge industrial building along the railroad tracks that once house an ice storage facility. The roof was missing in parts of the abandoned building, and one could wander the entire grounds during shows, where you either encountered a ruined vacancy that was art in itself, or some strange painting or performer or musician or sculpture.

I was on the third floor, wandering alone past empty rooms, when I walked by a room strewn with fabric on the floor and a giant snail shell in one corner. Possibly there was dirt on the floor as well. It was a surreal scene. I stopped to look in, and heard a rustling from inside the giant curled cone.

I had no idea if it was a person or an animal or a recording making the noise. I was frozen in fear and curiosity.

Rose appeared. But it wasn’t Rose: it was a creature seemingly made incarnate for the first time. The creature’s face and bare shoulders came blinking and crawling into the light, unsteady and blinking and afraid. Somehow, instantly, our terror of the new became one.

The rose/creature continued to emerge from its birthing shell, catching its breath and making noises with its mouth, both testing its voice and voicing its confusion.

I watched the birth in awe. The shell pushed her further, breasts and belly and torso in accordion movements as air and life increased.

As her waist appeared, the human form stopped. The creature had no legs, not quite a mermaid, more like a slug. This struggle was also a sea creature wrestling with landfall.

Finally free from the shell, rose/creature made their way to the center of the room and rested. I dropped my shoulders and caught my breath as well.

Then, rose/creature rose, and sang/spoke/shouted the joys of being alive. A gratitude song.

Then back to the ground. Then backwards into the shell. Then silence.

I walked away changed.

* * *

A few years later, we were tight. Rose was part of a core group of my friends, all living together within the same few blocks of downtown wasteland, drinking and eating and making art in mini operas of destruction and creation.

Our mutual friend Robert had sold a painting to some rich couple in Los Angeles, and the shipping was going to cost as much as the painting. Robert offered to pocket the shipping money and drive it himself, and in a farce that’s worthy of another story itself, eight of us got into a Uhaul—three in the front and five in the back—and drove across the hot desert to make the delivery.

We found camping on the coastline south of Los Angeles, and that evening all waded into the gentle edge of the surf zone and swam. It was a magic night, as the ocean was full of plankton—dinoflagellates—that glowed when agitated.

The bioluminescence made every breaking wave glow. As we swam, tracers of glowing plankton appeared. We pissed in the water and watched our initials glow to life. Rose was absolutely frolicking in the water, and I cherished the echo of her performance piece. My heart was filled with her gratitude song.

* * *

The next day, in the full light, we hit the ocean again, many of us pushing further out into the ocean to swim and play in the bigger waves.

I noticed Rose continuously get knocked down by the waves. She gamely tried to get out into the deeper waters, but couldn’t catch the rhythm of how to escape the big tumbler of surf. I saw her face go from elated anticipation to sorrow. Coughing and battered, she gave up and sat on the beach.

I got to shore and offered to help, explaining that if she just pushed through a hundred yards of the tough stuff, there was another sandbar further out, shallow enough she could stand upon it, a respite between the chaos at shore and the infinite depths.

We went out together, and I helped her dive into the base of breaking waves to avoid their wrath, swimming under and pushing through that ocean life force to find a balanced spot further out. I couldn’t help but think again of her birthing performance piece.

Finally her toes found purchase on the sand bar, and the waves rolled by instead of pushed. She bobbed up and down in joy, lifted to the air and then gently put down again by the mother-waters. She swam and bobbed, part slug and part mermaid, the embodiment of joy.

* * *

The world’s not big enough for Rose, and she moved on from Phoenix to live in the old mining town of Bisbee along the Mexican Border, and then to Bali, Indonesia. It was there, in 2009, where she died of methanol poisoning from drinking somebody’s poorly home-brewed alcohol. She was 48.

I looked up what methanol does to the body. It’s horrific. Rose’s death was senseless and cruel.

My only balm in thinking of Rose’s death was to know that she had prepared for it.  She not only lived a full life, never wasting a moment. She had thought out and processed the cycle of life repeatedly in her work.

Her art was full of births and deaths, of friends and lovers as well as her own miscarriage. She did the strange trick that all great artists do, which is live a fully human life while a shadow creator self watches, and then a third version creates an amalgamated version in the form of art.

Rose Johnson had already rehearsed her reincarnation. She would be her own doula, a guide through the glowing and cruel furies where water and land meet. She would find the place where she could float between the worlds, blooming in her rose senses. I can hear her howl.

Rest now.