There's something sublime about Aaron Johnson's work. Although his Trees series is just what is sounds like—paintings of trees—it's hard to look at any of his work without feeling a deeper connection rooted, if you'll pardon the pun, in the undercurrents and energies of the world and its people.

"It's definitely a way that I communicate with other people and life," says Johnson, showing the paintings in his garage-turned-studio off Green Valley Road. "It's a silent, visual form of communication. … It's a human contact, but in my case, it's probably also a way I relate to nature, the way I look at it and think about it."

Since the earliest years of his life, Johnson has been immersed in nature more than your average person. His father worked for the National Parks Service for the first five years of Johnson's life.

"From the very beginning, I was lucky in nature, lucky in trees," says Johnson, who attributes much of his naturalistic inclination to those formative years spent living in national parks in Oregon, California and Washington state.

He received a set of oil paints as a young boy and "started painting in my little-kid style, way back then."

Since then, his style has come a long way. He attended UC Santa Cruz and was trained formally in classic techniques of painting, etching, printing and lithography. He then spent time working for Yolla Bolly Press in Covelo, printing limited-edition books. The skill gained at Yolla Bolly evolved, and today he has illustrated two limited-edition books with woodcuts of his own.

"Working with Aaron Johnson was a wonderful experience," says Peggy Gotthold, co-owner of Foolscap Press, a Santa Cruz company that worked with Johnson on The Direction of the Road by Ursula K. Le Guin. "Aaron made a woodcut for our publication that gave the story a perfectly appropriate dimension."

Johnson also illustrated a limited-edition book containing two essays by British author, John Fowles.

"He came for a visit while we were working on it, and we got to meet him," Johnson says. "He was an interesting character. Fowles liked the tangle of wild nature."

The indefinable energy of quiet communication that is hinted at in Johnson's works is perhaps nowhere as apparent as in his Stories series of paintings. In this series, his small, deliberate brushstrokes come together to create fragments of stories—often with entire plots being suggested—in what one can only call a complex simplicity.

"There were three that I did early on that were inspired by childhood dreams," says Johnson. "In those there's a very powerful, natural force. I'm definitely interested in sources like that, perhaps old myths and stories, or just imagined ideas. ... The more I look at art, the more I'm drawn way back in history to, say, prehistoric art or cultures that were more connected to and more dependent on their natural environment."

Indeed, many of Johnson's works convey images that may have been the same in such prehistoric times as they are today, but with creative borders. The variation and uniqueness of the physical borders of his paintings—sometimes wooden and including shelves, sometimes actually painted into the painting itself—are one of the aspects that sets his work apart.

"Borders can work in a lot of different ways," he says. "Sometimes they're like a frame or a window or a definite boundary; other times, they can fragment or be more of a transitional area. It's almost endless the way they can work."

Yes, there is a latent power, an energy-at-rest in Johnson's work. At one point, sitting in his country home in Watsonville, he admits in the far-off voice of the stalwart dreamer, "I wish I could tap into the energy of some of those ancient cultures."

Though he may not realize it himself, it's obvious to observers of his work that he already has.