I was in my second year of college when I first heard about the alternative folk artist Daniel Johnston. It was the fall of 2017, two years before his death, and a classmate I liked wanted to show me a song. On his laptop, he opened an album from September 1983 titled Hi, How Are You with a black-and-white cover featuring a simple line drawing: a peculiar-looking frog creature with wide-open eyes hovering above his head and a gaping mouth shaped like a Cheerio cereal. The character looked as though it had been conceived by a child, not unlike the album’s whimsical songs referencing cheeseburger smiles and the experience of walking a cow.
The wide-eyed frog known as Jeremiah the Innocent is Johnston’s most iconic character, immortalized not only by the artist’s home-recorded cassette album, but also a beloved brick mural in Austin, Texas; collaborations with mainstream footwear and apparel brands; and sought-after posters and t-shirts like the one famously donned by late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.
This illustration is just a sliver of the vast visual lexicon that animated Johnston’s musical output and lifelong struggles with bipolar and manic-depressive disorder, as explored in the ongoing exhibition I Think, I Draw, I Am, on view at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn through August 10. Spanning more than 300 marker and pen works on paper set to the soundtrack of Johnston’s songs, the show examines the recurring motifs, themes, and stylistic elements that appear throughout Johnston’s art, which he was known to produce impulsively and obsessively.
Displayed without titles in identical wooden frames, the drawings are pulled from the thousands of original artworks comprising the Daniel Johnston Trust, which is managed today by Dick Johnston, the artist’s older brother who also sits on the board for the Hi, How Are You Foundation, a mental health nonprofit established in his honor.
“People caught on to this that Daniel was something …They didn’t know if he was going somewhere or not, but he propelled all kinds of people,” Dick Johnston told Hyperallergic.
Tinged with dark humor, the drawings range in tone and content, but tend to revolve around similar clashes between good and evil, hope and despair, and love and anguish, exemplified by heroic characters pitted against villainous figures. These include Johnston’s own inventions, like a flying eyeball known as Fly Eye; Jeremiah’s foil, the multi-headed Vile Corrupt; and a hollow-headed boxer named Joe, which reemerges throughout the drawings, offering commentary that alludes to the artist’s personal internal monologue.
Curated by Lee Foster, who co-owns Electric Lady Studios and serves as the curatorial advisor for the Daniel Johnston Trust, the Pioneer Works show is a glimpse into the dizzying psyche of an artist whose maximalist creative output was his main form of resistance against his mental demons. It’s a familiar storyline, akin to that of artists like Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Vincent Van Gogh. Johnston’s close-up marker portrait of the latter depicts the painter engrossed in a study of his mutilated left ear, which he is known to have cut off during a mental breakdown. (Johnston, for the record, was known to have had bouts of violence during the worst of his mental illness and was institutionalized several times, as explored thoroughly in Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston.)
Many of the pieces contain references to Johnston’s passion for comics: Captain America, Superman, and other heroes make frequent appearances as redemptive figures. Another running tangent is Johnston’s harrowing fixation with the devil — a fear stemming from his Christian fundamentalist upbringing that was magnified by psychotic illness. This paranoia is illustrated in an amusing drawing depicting the heavy metal band Metallica, a group he was convinced was satanic; in this vein, he portrays the band’s drummer as a skeleton.
Unrequited love is also a thread throughout the drawings, many of which include portrayals of women with flipped bob hairdos. These are juxtaposed against eerie, reductive, and limbless female forms, and one work that simply centers on the head of a blonde-haired woman whose body is substituted with a human foot. “I’ll just turn and walk away, never return,” she says in floating speech bubbles.
During a panel event at Pioneer Works in late June, Dick Johnston recalled their father’s characterization of these fascinations. “My Dad would say, ‘He believed in the idea of love, but he couldn’t execute it … It was an unreachable thing, and he idolized it in such a way that he made it unreachable,’” Johnston said.
The show aligns with the release of a book centered on the late artist and his legacy. Authored by Foster, Daniel Johnston: I’m Afraid Of What I Might Draw (2025) reflects on four decades of Johnston’s artwork and features essays by artists who have been inspired by his work. It comes after the publication of photographer Jung Kim’s Daniel Johnston: Is Always (2023), which offers an intimate view of the last years of Johnston’s life and the immediate aftermath of his death.
At the June panel, Foster described Johnston’s creativity as “manic obsessive,” as opposed to being purely intentional. “You couldn’t have stopped him,” Foster said. “It was just going to come out one way or another.”
Or, as Johnston’s high school friend explained in the 2005 film: “He never sits and thinks, ‘What am I gonna do?’ He just grabs something.”
