Gallery
Indeed, Johnson's work seems to be everywhere in Regina. His white sculptures depicting family groupings – located in front of Connaught School, the Cathedral Area Community Centre and an apartment block a few blocks east of Elphinstone on Thirteenth Avenue – have become integral to the Cathedral neighbourhood’s identity as an arts and cultural centre.
Known largely – and perhaps unfairly – as a stained glass artist, Johnson's original works and restorations of stained glass grace most of the major churches in Regina's downtown, as well as Casino Regina's poker room and the SaskEnergy boardroom. Johnson's work in various media has been shown widely in locations as diverse as Regina, Weyburn, Toronto and the UK. It has also attracted prestigious awards such as the Stained Glass Association of American's "award of excellence" for his installation at Regina's Wascana Rehabilitation Centre's chapel. The Saskatchewan Architectural Heritage Society give him its Heritage Architecture Excellence Award.
While the stained glass work kept him busy, Johnson resisted being labelled and limited as a stained glass artist. He believed that the foundation of visual art is the ability to draw. "If you learn to draw, there are many other things you can do," Chabun quotes him as saying. The evidence of this ability showed up in the Leader-Post in 1984 when the newspaper hired him to sketch the major characters in Colin Thatcher's murder trial. He saw art as "a way of discovering reality; finding, I suppose, the reality of myself and passing on a little of the reality of society and a lot about the reality of some other artists - some of whom became very good friends and very helpful."