The Ones That Got Away
Ideas not Completed
Johnson, like creative people everywhere, had more ideas popping into his head than he had time or resources to bring to completion. Some ideas don't work out quite the way the artist expects and have to be abandoned. The Waupun Historical Society recently found an album of Johnson's original poses. Some we recognize right away as finished projects and some never got any further than an idea.
What these pictures reveal is the wayJohnson created an idea in his imagination and then rounded up his friends and neighbors to help bring his ideas to life. That was the easy part. Then he had to spend hours in the studio painstakingly cutting and pasting images to achieve the final product.
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| N. 438 - These two little girls are all ready to go for a ride whenever Johnson hitches an animal to the front. The one girl has her hands ready to hold the reins. |
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| No. 439 - This gentleman is in the middle of the creek without - what? Was this going to be another fish story? We'll never know. |
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| No. 449 - Whatever they were going to do, it did not get done. |
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| No. 460 - I just know this would have been a good one. |
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| No. 462 - Nice picture, but like some of the early fish scenes, the buildings limit its appeal to other towns. |
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| No. 486 - I wish this one had been completed. It would have been the only dog cart to go with all the goats. |
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| No. 487 - Pushing something big onto the boxcar. |
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| No. 491 - This is actually the wagon used in "Father Works," but not the final pose. The final product uses the same boy as here, holding the reins, and a smaller child, probably Johnson's son, Alfie. In any case it demonstrated holding the front up so it could be in the right position for the big chicken. It also shows us that he probably took multiple shots of his scenes. |
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| No. 492 - This man is ready to hold up something huge and wonderful. |