excerpts from “Art and Joy” St Bernard Magazine

A few years ago,” King recalled, “a friend of mine was hosting a retreat for New Years, in which she was inviting out people to engage people in different healing modalities, and each of us was going to offer what we do. A friend of mine who’s a massage therapist was doing hands-on salt and oil scrubs, an acupuncturist was doing needling sessions, and I was in my studio working on a drawing, thinking, What do I have to offer? What I realized was how important to me the creative process has been and how much of a meditation the coloring of my work is.”

“So I took a couple of drawings that I hadn’t inked yet,” King continued, “I made copies of them, and I led a workshop for folks on coloring. It was amazing. As people worked on their drawings, I walked around the room and I talked to them—I talked to each table—and people broke through their challenges.”

When the pandemic moved the world into quarantine, King felt others needed easy access to the healing power of the creative process more than ever.

“So early in the pandemic, I took those same drawings that I used on the retreat,” said King, “and I uploaded them onto Facebook. I had something that a lot of people didn’t: doing this lifesaving process for over thirty years. I had a practice that I engaged in when everything else goes awry. So I invited people to download these images and color them at home. It was super beautiful because people started doing that and posting their images.” Johnny King interviewed by Michelle Nicolson for St Bernard Magazine

Feature 1

“You don’t need to be an artist to benefit from the creative process. Anyone who’s sung along with the radio, knows the joy of singing,” King reminds us. “So give yourself the opportunity to create.”

Feature 2

“What I’ve learned is, the fear is there, and you have to take the right step anyway,” King added. “You might think you have no time for painting. You might think you have no time for dancing. You might think you have no time for song. What I’ve done in these drawings is I’ve made it easier. You’re not inventing anything. You’re simply going and moving and flowing and creating.”