Michael Johnson grew up surrounded by art; both his parents were painters and there were framed prints of Vermeer and Albert Pinkham Ryder hanging on the walls of his childhood home in Mosman. Leaving school at fourteen he worked at the Lintas agency, rambled around rural NSW on painting trips with close friend Brett Whiteley and studied at the Julian Ashton Art School and the National Art School in Sydney.
In 1960, he decided to travel and departed by ship passing through Egypt, Greece and Italy on route to London. He met Whiteley in Florence and together they decided to travel to Bologna to visit the studio of the Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi. When he eventually arrived in London he spent the next seven years painting full time while also working as a studio assistant to the British sculptors Brian Wall and Anthony Caro.
Living in London, he immersed himself in the art world, meeting Francis Bacon, David Hockney, and Oskar Kokoschka. Unlike other Australian artists who found international success through figurative and semi-abstracted landscape, Johnson's European experience distilled his love of colour, space, and form into highly abstract works. Returning to Sydney in 1967, he contributed to a generational shift towards minimal geometric abstraction.
Mixing his own pigments and stretching his own frames, his minimal works eliminated recognisable imagery in favour of abstraction. Inspired by Italian painters, Brancusi's forms, Albers's drama, and Matisse's colour, his work was a uniquely Australian interpretation of a global shift away from representation.
Many of Johnson's large nocturnal and oceanic blue works evoke a personal memory of staring through the seawater on a dark night and marvelling at the phosphorescence and the bioluminescence of the organisms swimming in the sea.
Moving to New York in 1970, his work gradually embraced more texture and a palette identifiable with a ‘bush spectrum’. Interested in nature's diversity, he drew inspiration from various sources, including bird feathers, metallic colours, and natural patterns. Colour and light remained lifelong preoccupations, influencing every major shift in his work.