Mark Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1971 and received a BFA in Fine Art from the University of Georgia in Athens in 1995. He settled in Colorado and has lived in the heart of the Rocky Mountains almost continuously since 1996. There his love of painting and the outdoors naturally led him to working en plein air.. What started as an exercise to improve his other expressive figurative works led to a new passion of exploring and portraying the natural beauty he was surrounded by. The direction of his work has shifted away from strictly representational pieces and is now focused on capturing the feel and mood of a setting through the use of color and light. Atmospheric and ethereal images result from this process capturing those fleeting moments of illumination found in nature, that you wish would last just a little bit longer.