Crawling Through the Milky Way

“When I’m painting, I have this weird feeling, like I’m crawling over the dimensions of the subject,” Claire Johnson says from the passenger seat of my Subaru. We’re on our way to stargaze at Golden Gardens, to stare into the night sky that has inspired many of her paintings. Whether it’s a star-filled twilight, a sprinkle-encrusted donut, or a blazing forest fire, Johnson captures every faint speckle on her subject’s surface like an ant summiting a cru