It was a bright September day just after Hurricane Isabel blew threw Great Falls when Margaret Johnson suddenly realized she has no more ponies to contribute to the horse nativity pageant that she produces at Village Centre on the first Friday night in December every year.
She’s been staging the quiet drama of the birth of Christ for about 10 years, since she first asked for equal time with Santa Claus. While he sits in the gazebo and discusses toys with children, Johnson directs the actors and actresses who play out the story of the Christmas at the opposite corner of the village green.
Almost two years ago, when Johnson closed the Great Falls Horse Center after 20 years in business, she promised herself she’d do things she’d been putting off.
She would spend more time with her grandchildren: Kelsey, now 8, and Dylan, 4. She would do more volunteer work for her church, National Presbyterian Church in the District of Columbia, where she is a deacon, a choir member, a bell player, a floral designer, and a member of the sacraments committee.
She would travel more, Johnson promised herself. She would take a cruise to Alaska. And, she would paint, just as she’d always wanted.
RUNNING THE HORSE Center, Johnson said, “was a 23-hour a day job. I didn’t have time to paint.”
Though her family and friends knew about Johnson’s simmering affinity for the creative arts, it may have surprised some of her friends in the horse world. There, artistry is more likely to form in the raked patterns in sawdust on the barn floor than what is required to capture the ambient morning light on a timeworn red barn in Great Falls.
“I had always wanted to paint barns,” Johnson said. And it was a friend from the horse world, Flo Dougherty, who first asked her to paint a barn that no longer existed. “[Flo] was the first one to give me a job,” Johnson said.
One barn led to another, and two years later, Johnson is preparing a portfolio of her oil paintings to display at the Great Falls Community Library.
Her style, which she calls “creative realism,” permits departure from absolute reality.
When she painted the barn that belongs to her neighbor, Great Falls Historian Karen Washburn, Johnson included two horses that weren’t actually in the scene.
Later, she changed their color from one bay and one chestnut to two bays, with the appropriate white markings, to match Washburn’s horses.
Among the images on display at the library are many familiar scenes, many of them on Georgetown Pike: a red barn on the Manning Gasch property in McLean; a shed in Great Falls that is adorned with an American flag and accented with yellow forsythia; former Dranesville Supervisor Mark Turner Sr.’s barn at The Turner Farm in Great Falls, and Don and Billie McCoy’s barn at Stonegate Farm.
Johnson usually tried to contact the owners of the barns she paints, but isn’t often successful. Several notes she’s stuck to doors and mailboxes have come back unanswered.
She’s visited barns in Shepherdstown, W.V., and Scottsville, Va.
She’s also painted scenes of Washington from the Virginia banks of the Potomac.
WHEN SHE VISITED Washburn to show off the painting of her barn, Johnson, the painter, pumped Washburn, the historian, for directions to more genuine barns, particularly those that date to the 1940s when Fairfax County’s chief industry was not real estate, but dairy farming.
Washburn named several, including a red barn on the Collas Harris estate on Leigh Mill Road.
Johnson said she likes to paint the barns she sees every day, and she’s hoping to get more suggestions after her exhibit opens and her friends in the horse community realize she didn’t just talk about painting barns on canvas, she’s doing it.
Then she spied Washburn’s pony, and wondered if he might be available for the horse nativity pageant this year,
Johnson’s first exhibit opens with a reception from 6-8 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 3, at the Great Falls Community Library.