DANIEL JOHNSTON

During the last six years of his life, the acclaimed singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston (1961-2019) collaborated with his sister Marjory on a series of multi-media drawings inspired directly by his music. In each of these works, Daniel used watercolor and marker to create fanciful figures, sometimes human, sometimes demonic and sometimes animal (including images of his iconic “Jeremiah the Frog”). Frequently, drawings would begin with Daniel elaborating on fragments torn out of magazines by Marjory. In speech bubbles, Daniel added comic or poignant phrases, while in the white spaces surrounding Daniel’s characters, Marjory wrote out in the lyrics from her brother’s songs. Each drawing contains the complete lyrics to a single song in Marjory’s hand, thus bringing together the two sides of Daniel Johnston’s work: art and music. Each work is signed by Daniel and by Marjory, who adds the title of each song, and the cassette or album on which it first appeared, as well as the date the drawing was completed. A selection of these works were shown at Redbud Gallery in Houston in early 2019, in one of the last exhibitions of Daniel Johnston’s art before his death on September 11, 2019, at the age of 58. In 2021, Fly Eye Books published Daniel Johnston: Songs to Look At, which reproduced over 200 of the drawings.