 |
| Mitchell Johnson "Two Chairs (Wellfleet)," 2019, 70x84 inches, oil/canvas. |
"Two Chairs (Wellfleet)" was donated to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by the late, Jack Blanton.
The painting appears in the new Edward Burns film, The Family McMullen (2025).
Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Massachusetts presents Twenty Years in Truro (Selected Paintings 1989-2025), a solo exhibition of paintings by San Francisco Bay Area artist Mitchell Johnson, on view September 3–14, 2025. This is Johnson’s fifth exhibition at Castle Hill, where he teaches a master color class every September.
There have been three watershed moments in Mitchell Johnson’s 45-year painting career: the first, a work trip to France in 1989, the second, his move from New York City to Palo Alto, California in 1990, and the third, an initial painting trip to Cape Cod in 2005. In his own words:
“I followed a very strong hunch that what I needed in 1989 was to leave graduate school and paint alone in France. It was all my idea, all my doing. In 1990, I was offered a chance to work in the studio of Sam Francis in Palo Alto, California. I didn’t want to leave NYC. I called Sol LeWitt on the phone, hoping he would say that I could join the Wall Drawing Team and stay in NYC. Instead he convinced me that I should move to California. In 2005, the art dealer Sally Munson invited me to visit Chatham, MA, to produce local work for a show she was curating of my European landscapes. My first paintings of Truro, paintings which changed my trajectory, were made because of Sally. Life, especially life in the art world, is an interesting combination of the things you pursue and the things that come your way. California fell into my lap. Truro fell into my lap.”
Johnson’s 20 years of annual painting trips to Cape Cod started in May 2005, immediately after he saw the historic Giorgio Morandi and Josef Albers exhibit in Bologna, Italy. He arrived on the Cape at a pivotal moment when his paintings were becoming less brushy, less impressionistic, more about large areas of flat color using familiar, even iconic, motifs to comment on color relativity. The range of work on view in the 2025 survey at Castle Hill illustrates the importance of this first stay on the Cape, examining the impact of North Truro motifs on all of his paintings. It features early Truro works borrowed from the Cape Cod Museum of Art, including “Truro n. 6” (2005), which appeared in two feature films by Nancy Meyers: The Holiday (2009) and Crazy Stupid Love (2011). The show also includes paintings from New York, Europe, California, New England, and Newfoundland.
Art critic Donald Kuspit reviewed Johnson’s paintings three times, including in a 2023 Whitehot Magazine article:
“Johnson is a master of abstraction, as his oddly constructivist paintings show, but of unconscious feeling, for his geometry serves to contain and with that control the strong feelings implicit in his strong colors. Apart from that, his paintings are art historically important, because they seamlessly fuse abstraction and realism, which Kandinsky tore apart to the detriment of both even as he recognized that they were implicitly inseparable, tied together in a Gordian knot, as they masterfully are in Johnson’s paintings.”
Mitchell Johnson began painting in the late 1970s as a teenager at Staten Island Academy. He received his MFA from Parsons School of Design in 1990 and also studied painting, drawing, and art history at the Washington Studio School and Randolph-Macon College. His paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums. He has appeared on TV programs in France (BFM Nice), Italy (Generazione Bellezza), and Monaco (Monaco InfoTV). He has been a visiting artist at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, Borgo Finocchieto, and the LeWitt House in Praiano, Italy.
Twenty Years in Truro (Selected Paintings 1989-2025) is on view September 3–14 at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
Additionally, Johnson’s exhibition of Paris paintings at Flea Street in Menlo Park, California, has been extended through September 18, 2025.
Mitchell Johnson's paintings are advertised in the April 7, May 7, June 9, June 23, July 21, August 18, 2025. Click to expand the photo for higher quality.
%20on%20the%20back%20cover%20of%20May%2026,%202025%20New%20Yorker%20Magazine.png)
 |
| Inside Front Cover of April 7, 2025 New Yorker Magazine |
 |
| Across from The Ethicist in April 6, 2025 NY Times Magazine |
Mitchell Johnson (b. 1964, Rock Hill, South Carolina) is an American painter known for his vibrant, color-centric works that test the boundaries between abstraction and representation. His paintings are rooted in a deep investigation of color relationships, shape, and spatial perception, often drawn from his experiences in locations such as California, New England, Europe and Newfoundland.
Johnson studied painting and drawing at Randolph-Macon College (B.S., 1986) with Ray Berry, then studied art history, painting and drawing at the Washington Studio School and Parsons School of Design (M.F.A., 1990), where he learned from legendary teachers Leland Bell, Paul Resika, Robert De Niro, Sr., Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher and Nell Blaine. In 1990, he moved to California to work as a studio assistant for painter Sam Francis, an experience that helped shape his mature approach to color and scale. He also studied with Wolf Kahn In Santa Fe, further deepening his sensitivity to color, scale and atmosphere.
Art historian Peter Selz described Johnson as “an artist who makes realist paintings that are basically abstract paintings and abstract paintings that are figurative.” Johnson himself has noted, “I don’t paint chairs; I turn chairs into paintings,”encapsulating his approach to transforming the familiar through color, composition, and formal rigor.
His work often features distilled scenes—urban landscapes, architecture, coastlines—rendered with a painterly touch and bold, simplified blocks of color. This gives his paintings a formal structure while maintaining emotional resonance and a sense of place.
Johnson’s work has been the subject of three major essays by renowned art critic Donald Kuspit, published in Whitehot Magazine. Kuspit writes that Johnson's paintings “demonstrate that realism can serve abstraction, and abstraction can serve realism,” praising his ability to bridge both traditions in a way that is highly original and formally inventive. Kuspit considers Johnson a unique voice in contemporary American art for his “realistic abstraction.”
Johnson's work is held in over 35 museum collections and has been featured in solo exhibitions across the United States and Europe. Highlights include:
A 2024 retrospective at Musée Villa les Camélias in Cap d’Ail, France.
“Giant Paintings from New England, California and Newfoundland” at 425 Market Street, San Francisco (March–May 2025).
Group Show Glass House, New Canaan, Ct in June.
Numerous exhibitions at Truro Center for the Arts.
Johnson's work has also reached wider audiences through popular media:
His paintings have appeared in major feature films, including The Holiday (2006), It’s Complicated (2009), and Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), helping to familiarize viewers with his distinct visual language.
He has participated in several television interviews in Italy, France, and Monaco, including a 2024 appearance on BFM Nice discussing his Cap d’Ail retrospective and an interview on Monaco Info.
In 2024, he appeared on the national Italian television program Generazione Bellezza during a special segment filmed at the Lewitt House in Praiano on the Amalfi Coast, highlighting his work in the broader context of artistic and cultural heritage.
Artistic Evolution and Independent Ventures:
After 25 years within the traditional gallery system, exhibiting in major galleries across San Francisco, New York, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles, Johnson embarked on an independent path in 2012. He initiated partnerships with prominent publications such as The New York Times Magazine, ArtForum, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and The New Yorker.This strategic move expanded his audience, allowing his paintings to reach readers nationwide and internationally.
Johnson lives and works in Menlo Park, California, with his wife, author Donia Bijan. His studio remains a space of continuous experimentation and refinement, as he pursues new formal challenges and explores the emotional resonance of color and place.
 |
| Mitchell Johnson Positano Painting appears across from The Ethicist, Jan 19, 2025. |
 |
| Mitchell Johnson Newfoundland Painting appears across from The Ethicist, Jan 5, 2025. |
New limited edition sets of boxed Mitchell Johnson notecards are available from Amazon.
Click to see the Amalfi set, the Newfoundland set.
 |
| Mitchell Johnson "Torrenieri," 2011 22x26 inches, oil/canvas |
 |
| "Not Santa Barbara," 2017 18x14 inches, oil/canvas |
Watch the Mitchell Johnson BFM Cote D'Azur television interview or read about the museum retrospective at Villa Les Camilias in Hyperallergic.
 |
| "Montisi," 2001 40x70 inches oil/canvas (©2024 Mitchell Johnson) |
 |
| "Diamonds for Eggleston (Mieders)," 2009 14x20 inches oil/canvas (©2024 Mitchell Johnson) |
This essay was originally published in 2014 in the monograph, Mitchell Johnson: Color as Content.
 |
| Mitchell Johnson "Ferrovia (Winter)," 2004 38x78 inches oil/canvas |
Heir of Theirs:
Mitchell Johnson and Fairfield Porter
by Alexander Nemerov
A pleasing thing about Mitchell Johnson’s paintings is how they suggest other artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Giorgio Morandi, and Josef Albers. The references are pleasing because they do not come across as superficial signs of “influence” any more than as melodramatic indications of heroic artistic struggle. Johnson is neither creating a superficial pastiche nor waging an epic battle to win a style of his own. Both those art historical stories make little sense when looking at his art.
Instead his paintings are achieved—that word, “achieved,” indicating a quiet and intense transit through the work of these other artists. That transit is a response and a correspondence between him and them, a felt connection, that leaves us outward signs of affinity, sure, but also a more elusive sense that Johnson knows these artists from the inside. And if that is the case, then what is pleasing about Johnson’s art is more exactly the presence of Bonnard and company, for any achieved art such as Johnson’s will carry within itself, as signs of its seriousness, not just references to previous artists but something intrinsic or essential to their pictures. What is pleasing, then, is that something essential would appear to live on, past those earlier painters’ long-ago deaths, in the art of this heir of theirs working in our own time. One such artist living in Johnson’s paintings is another of his acknowledged masters, Fairfield Porter.
Porter died in 1975 at the age of sixty-eight, after an approximately two-decade run as a painter of increasing strength and skill (his first one-person show was not until 1952, when he was forty-five). Working from his homes on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, and Southampton, New York, Porter created masterpieces in the 1960s such as Morning Landscape (fig. 1), a Great Spruce Head picture showing his nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth, that invite comparison to a Johnson painting such as Ferrovia (Winter), of 2004 (fig. 2). The Albers-Morandi rectangle may palpitate at the upper center of Ferrovia, but the local colors of the railway workers’ clothing and safety vests, as well as the pole-and-rails architectonics of the railway yard, summon the brightness of Porter’s porch-screen harbor view. Despite the different handling and different subjects (Johnson’s painting shows a place in Italy), the color patches in each picture show the two painters’ common allegiance to Bonnard, whose retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art helped set Porter on his path when he saw it in 1948, the year after Bonnard’s death.
Another factor links Porter and Johnson—their common wish to make a painting be the record of two contrary things: the artist’s will and a scene’s resistance to that will. Porter’s friend James Schuyler wrote to him to say that “there seems to me to be an excitement in your pictures created by your desire, as a painter, to have your own way with your subject matter, that is at odds with a desire not to lose what it was that drew you to it in the first place, by tampering with it.” In Morning Landscape Porter imposes his choices of color and design, but the Maine location asks that he portray its own atmosphere, too, as a thing apart from his artistic will. Schuyler called the play of such contraries “an excellent tension.”
Johnson, by the same token, says he tries to combine “the reality of my emotional response to a situation or view with the formal demands of the painting.” A picture, in other words, becomes a record of what the painting requires—“the painting’s own voice,” Johnson calls it—and what the scene itself also demands. The hull of the red lobster boat in the Maine scene Cape Porpoise (Red Boat) asks that Johnson carve out its particular shape, that he learn its line, even as the painting requires him to make that hull abut either lateral edge of the canvas (fig. 3). Such a boat appears in the mid-ground of Porter’s The Dock, of 1974-75, where presumably it sits in equal obeisance to what a Maine harbor and this particular painting ask of it (fig. 4). The boat sits to one side of the dock, marking the end of it and, who knows (such the perceptual complexities), making that dock turn back around on itself and “return” to our space instead of just zooming away. This dock that neither comes nor goes also appears to float, thanks in part to the boat that buoys and lifts it there at the end, as if by some subtle tug of levitation. So it is that a painting is a composite of parts orchestrating an effect of the now, what Schuyler called Porter’s “exaltation in repose,” and so that term speaks to Johnson’s art, too.
But there is one way Porter is not present in Johnson’s paintings. Porter’s work can be brooding. Maybe this is what the critic Brian O’Doherty meant when he wrote of “the gathering quietness” of the pictures he saw in Porter’s show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1964—their sense of “nostalgia . . . re-created as an experience, not merely remembered.” Maybe for all its lyric color Morning Landscape, painted the following year, contains that sadness. Maybe, too, this melancholy was a New England phenomenon. Porter, “as taciturn as a New England minister” (in the recollection of the painter Larry Rivers), made pictures that seemed to combine Bonnard’s hedonism and Hawthorne’s reserve and even glumness. (It is difficult to specify how this is apparent in Morning Landscape except maybe in the way there is a touch of Hawthorne’s little Pearl in Porter’s daughter Elizabeth.) The poet John Ashbery, Porter’s friend, put it best when he wrote of “the dark light of space” that shows through Porter’s “transparent and porous” colors. Call this dark light the minister’s allegorical glimmer.
Maybe not just melancholy but a certain neurosis is a part of Porter’s work, too. It is a period affect, very mid-twentieth century in character, possibly New England in nature, too, wherein the world vibrates to one or the other side of contentment. Ashbery likened the reverberation of his friend’s paintings to “the fumbled parlor-piano tunes in the “Alcotts’ section of [Charles] Ives’s ‘Concord’ Sonata.” The pictures likewise put one in mind of writers such as J. D. Salinger, so that in Porter’s art it is somehow always “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The house in Porter’s well-known painting Island Farmhouse (1969), built by Porter’s father James in 1926, featured two big decorative interior panels of a male and female dragon, painted by James and looking like something out of The Wizard of Oz, that Porter both could not stand and yet insisted be kept in place. These psychological things loaded and overloaded never appear in Island Farmhouse, yet somehow they form part of its atmosphere.
Johnson’s painting is not to be faulted for being without these psychological tones. His art is his own achievement, and of course he is not obliged to carry forward all nuances, depths, and over-shadings, of the artists he admires. This is even supposing that such a complete transference were desirable or even possible. More likely, it is vitally important for Johnson, as it would be for any artist, to “misread” or otherwise adjust the earlier artist’s work until it takes on the look of something new and personally “right” to him, adapted to meet his own sense of things.
But the missing part of Porter’s art in Johnson’s pictures raises an interesting question about the presence of Porter in Johnson’s art. If Johnson does not “get” Porter in this way, then is Porter really present in his work? If not, again, it is no big deal, not necessarily. But if he is not, then a certain true lineage with an earlier art—with that of a mid-twentieth century painter—is here actually not a lineage at all. There is a carry-over, a felt connection, an affinity, to be sure, and that is the seriousness of Johnson’s pictures, but there is not a lineage. And if there is not a lineage, then Porter does not “live” in Johnson’s art. That does not mean Porter’s art is dead, far from it, but it does mean that his pictures await another soul who would speak with their voice.
1 James Schuyler, letter to Fairfield Porter, n. d., quoted in Justin Spring, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 205-6.
2 Mitchell Johnson, quoted in Peter Campion, “Giving Life to Painting: An Interview,” in Mitchell Johnson: New Paintings (St. Helena, California: I. Wolk Gallery, 2005), 6.
3 Schuyler, letter to Porter, quoted in Spring, 206.
4 Brian O’Doherty, “Art: By Fairfield Porter; His School of Paris Works, Which Bring the Outdoors In, Shown at de Nagy’s,” New York Times, May 24, 1964, p. 32.
5 Larry Rivers, What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography (New York: Aaron Asher Books/HarperCollins, 1992), 266; quoted in Spring, 194.
6 John Ashbery, “Respect for Things As They Are,” in Ashbery and Kenworth Moffett, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975): Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 13.
7 Ashbery, “Respect for Things As They Are,” 13.
8 Eliot Porter, Summer Island: Penobscot Country (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1966), 51; quoted in Spring, 209.
Alexander Nemerov is a Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford University.
