For over 30 years, Texas-based artist and musician Johnston has been obsessively recording his thoughts and stories into expressive drawings, super-8 films, and cassette tape compilations. Autobiographical, intensely emotional, and rendered with a raw spontaneity, Johnston’s drawings reflect his personal, decades-long struggle with bipolar disorder. The work, primarily notebook-size in scale, features an array of recurring symbols and characters. These characters include well-known comic book icons like Captain America and Casper the Friendly Ghost along side those of his own imagination like “The Frog of Innocence” and “Joe the Boxer”. Johnston’s heroic figures are often pictured in battles against Satan and a cast of evil demons. As such, they are portraits of his own inner struggles and the precarious balance between brilliance and madness.

Daniel Johnston lives in Waller, TX and works out of a studio in his parents’ garage.

Johnston has been a fixture in the Austin music scene since the 1970’s. His music, written with the same raw emotional sensibility as his drawings, has been widely embraced by the indie rock community and has been covered by an array of musicians including Beck and Wilco. Johnston’s drawings are featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, March 1-May 28. He is also the subject of an award-winning documentary film, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which will be released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 31, 2006.