Born in Iowa, the son of a Baptist minister, Raymond Jonson followed his family from one parish to another through the Middle and Far West until 1902, when they settled in Portland, Oregon. In 1909 Jonson attended his first formal art classes at the school of the Portland Art Association, where he studied with Kate Cameron Simmons, who had been a pupil of Arthur Wesley Dow at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. Dow, whose notable students included Georgia O’Keeffe and Max Weber, focused on the non-naturalistic use of color, and the Japanese print technique of space relationships and the proper balance of light and dark masses—concepts that influenced Jonson’s search to express the abstract concept of pure emotion through painting. In 1910, Jonson moved to Chicago, enrolling in classes at both the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. When the Armory Show came to The Art Institute in 1913, its Post-Impressionist, Fauvist, Cubist, and Futurist art afforded Jonson the most comprehensive view of modern art to date, and confirmed his direction as an artist. In 1913–18, through an introduction by his mentor, artist Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt 1878–1955), Jonson worked as a stage and costume designer, scene painter, electrician, and carpenter for the Chicago Little Theatre. There he met and married theatre colleague, Vera White, in 1916. Enjoying early success, Jonson exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago and the Swedish-American Club. His first one-man exhibition was held in 1917, in Madison, Wisconsin. That same year Jonson joined the teaching staff of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In 1918, The University of Oklahoma Museum of Art, Norman, added one of his works to its collection. In 1919 and 1920 Jonson and his wife summered at the MacDowell Colony, in Petersborough, New Hampshire, where he was a recipient of a MacDowell Association scholarship.
Jonson’s interest in theatrical stage design and lighting led him to study the creative possibilities of greatly simplified settings for contemporary and classical drama. In 1920 Jonson was in New York for production of Euripides’ Medea at the Garrick Theater for which he designed the set and costumes as stage manager. At the close of the production he travelled to Ogunquit, Maine, which resulted in at least fifteen oil sketches and four drawings. Jonson’s series of sea paintings dating from 1921–23 resulted from this visit.
This abbreviated stylization of his sea paintings can also be seen in his paintings of New Mexico during the 1924–27 period. Jonson’s first extended stay in New Mexico took place in 1922. His spirit soared in this new environment, particularly struck by the grandeur of the mountains and the artistic possibilities he saw in the local landscape. He was pleased by the creative atmosphere of Santa Fe, which seemed to him relatively contemporary in viewpoint. During this period he focused on abstraction based on natural forms and carefully graduated arrangements of colored planes. These pictures were realistic in the sense that certain physical conditions were suggested, but he used the jagged quality of the mountains to develop a style of brittle clarity and repetition of similar shapes to vitalize his canvases. These free interpretations of nature had a basis in the work of Cézanne and Picabia, whose works Jonson was exposed to at the abbreviated version of the Armory Show exhibited in Chicago. The mechanistic and geometric quality of Jonson’s early images reflect the formal components of the local landscape as it is reduced to a diagram of lava and sandstone molded into streamlined shapes.
Jonson worked in Santa Fe from 1924 until 1949, when he moved to Albuquerque to head the fine arts program at the University of New Mexico. He remained in Albuquerque for the rest of his life. His influence on young artists in both Santa Fe and Albuquerque was enormous. Beginning in 1927, Jonson had moved in the direction of schematic abstractions. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, nature was rarely absent from his paintings. As the 1930s progressed, so did Jonson’s art toward total abstraction. The Universe series, begun in 1935, and the Cosmic Theme series, started in 1936, indicate Jonson’s departure from nature and landscapes, and ultimately his release from landlocked concepts. These paintings are open, airy, and mysterious. By the late 1930s Jonson had achieved a considerable body of works to which he felt he could apply the term “absolute,” in which the design concept had come to a complete realization. He felt that he had developed a visual organization which eliminated sensations related to any type of external, objective experience. In 1938, he and fellow New Mexico artist, Emil Bisttram (1895–1976) co-founded the short-lived Transcendental Painters Group, a loosely affiliated group of artists dedicated to non-objective, spiritually infused painting.