Mitchell Johnson (artist) Wikipedia page

 

Mitchell Johnson (artist)

Mitchell Johnson (born 1964) is an American painter known for his vibrant, architecturally inspired landscapes and color field compositions that blend abstraction and representation. His career is notable not only for the distinct visual language of his paintings but also for his unconventional approach to visibility and audience-building in the contemporary art world. After decades working within the traditional gallery system, Johnson transitioned to operating independently, leveraging high-profile print media to promote his work on his own terms.

Early Life and Education

Johnson was born in 1964 in South Carolina and raised primarily in New York and Virginia before settling in California in 1990. As a teenager he studied painting with Martha Moses at Staten Island Academy. He received a Bachelor of Science from Randolph-Macon College in Virginia in 1986, and later studied painting, drawing and art history at The Washington Studio School (19860-1988) and Parsons School of Design in New York City where he earned an MFA in 1990. Early in his career, Johnson did part-time jobs for Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt and Sam Francis, gleaning insight into the workings of the art world. He continued his education studying with Wolf Kahn in Sante Fe in 1992 and participating in the famous drawing marathon at the New York Studio School with Graham Nickson in 2000. Johnson's teachers at Parsons were many former students of Hans Hofmann: Paul Resika, Leland Bell, Larry Rivers, Nell Blaine, Jane Freilicher and Robert De Niro, Sr. Johnson adopted their reverence for painting and drawing from life and interest in art history.

Artistic Style

Johnson’s paintings are often characterized by their bold color palettes, flattened perspectives, and architectural references. His work navigates a space between abstraction and representation, frequently depicting landscapes, buildings, and interiors from places such as California, New England, New Mexico and Europe. Critics such as Donald Kuspit, Alexander Nemerov and Peter Selz have compared his style to modernists like Giorgio Morandi, Fairfield Porter and Josef Albers, citing his inventive, personal approach to composition and color theory.

Career and Gallery Representation

For the first 25 years of his career, Johnson was represented by several traditional galleries in the United States. His early work was shown by Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery and Hackett-Freedman Gallery in San Francisco as well as Tatistcheff Gallery in New York and Los Angeles. He participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationwide. His paintings are included in 700 private collections and over 35 museum collections.

In 2012, Johnson shifted away from exclusive gallery representation. Seeking more control over the description and context of his work, he moved toward a self-directed model, positioning himself outside the standard gallery circuit.

Use of Print Media

In lieu of social media or online platforms, Johnson began advertising his paintings through full-page placements in high-profile print publications. These include The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Architectural Digest, and HTSI (How To Spend It, the Financial Times' luxury lifestyle magazine).

This unconventional strategy aligned his paintings with media associated with cultural authority and intellectual taste. It allowed Johnson to cultivate what he calls "analog visibility," a form of intentional, non-algorithmic audience-building that emphasizes presence and narrative control. His paintings have appeared in The New York Times over 200 times going back to 2012.

Selected Exhibitions

In 2024, during his solo exhibition La révélation de Meyreuil at the Musée Villa les Camélias in Cap d’Ail, France, Johnson was received by Prince Albert II of Monaco. A photograph of their meeting, which took place in the museum's main gallery, was widely circulated, underscoring the cultural recognition of Johnson's work beyond the United States. The meeting was documented with an official photograph, which shows Johnson doing a color exercise with Prince Albert II in the gallery space during a private gathering at the museum.

• 2025 – Giant Paintings from New England, California and Newfoundland, 425 Market Street, San Francisco, CA; Small Paintings, Galerie Mercier, Paris

• 2024 – La révélation de Meyreuil, Musée Villa les Camélias, Cap d’Ail, France; Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Truro, MA; Flea Street, Menlo Park, CA

• 2023 – It Takes Time, 229 Hamilton Avenue (formerly Pace Palo Alto), Palo Alto, CA; Some Dogs, 419 10th Street, San Francisco, CA (Group exhibition of Pamela Hornik's collection); Circle of Sam, Bakersfield Museum of Art, Bakersfield, CA; All in Favor, Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL

• 2022 – Provincetown Art Association, Provincetown, MA; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL; Truro Center for the Arts, Truro, MA; Flea Street, Menlo Park, CA

• 2021 – Truro Center for the Arts, Truro, MA; Flea Street, Menlo Park, CA; Pamela Walsh Gallery, Palo Alto, CA; Questroyal Fine Art, New York, NY (Group exhibition including Milton Avery, Jane Freilicher); Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

• 2020 – Pop-Up Exhibit, Menlo Park, CA; Sidley Austin, Palo Alto, CA

• 2019 – Bridgehampton Museum, Bridgehampton, NY; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ; Pop-Up Exhibit, Menlo Park, CA

• 2018 – Mitchell Johnson: Color and Place, Terrence Rogers Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA; Ogunquit Museum of Art, Ogunquit, ME

• 2017 – Palo Alto Art Center, Palo Alto, CA; Villa Taverna, Rome, Italy; Cisco Meraki, San Francisco, CA

• 2016 – San Jose Institute of Art, San Jose, CA; One Post, San Francisco, CA; Stanford IRiSS, Stanford, CA

• 2015 – 25-Year Retrospective, Bakersfield Museum of Art, Bakersfield, CA; Places We Know, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM (Group exhibition including Georgia O'Keeffe); Stanford Center on Longevity, Stanford, CA; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT (Director's Favorites Exhibit); Cisco Meraki, San Francisco, CA

• Philosophy and Reception

In his essay "Heir of Theirs: Mitchell Johnson and Fairfield Porter," written for the 2014 monograph, Color as Content, accompanying Johnson’s retrospective at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, art historian Alexander Nemerov explored the lineage of Johnson’s work within the American figurative tradition. Nemerov wrote:

"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."

In a 2012 review for Provincetown Arts, writer Chris Busa explored the approach Johnson takes in his work:

"If many of Johnson’s paintings are titled after the places that inspired them, no such places actually exist. Each one is a collage of compressed intimacies spread out over the months it takes to paint them. He has done what Edwin Dickinson called ‘Premier Coup’, in which a painting is completed outdoors in one blow. Yet his typical practice is to hold a painting for several months, or more, in the studio, to see if a painting stands the test of repeated looking, often involving the process of memory revision, where a succession of impressions gained over weeks or months is expressed as continuous flow."

Art critic Donald Kuspit reviewed Johnson’s work in 2023 in Whitehot Magazine, noting his concerns for both art history and abstraction:

"Art history insidiously echoes in — ingeniously informs — all of Johnson’s works. 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."

In a 2004 review for ARTnews of Johnson’s 2003 exhibition at Terrence Rogers Fine Art, critic Susan Emerling praised the artist’s dynamic brushwork and sensitivity to color:

"Mitchell Johnson’s latest oil paintings of European beach scenes are fresh and pleasing. Using large brushy strokes and bright, often improbable colors, Johnson gives dynamic form to everyday life with an Impressionistic sensibility.

In the 2003 work, Numana & Hossegor, Johnson depicts bathers heading into the sea. The surf is rendered as an abstract swath of frothy white set against a vibrant green horizon. The sand is a field of neon orange, creating a visual correlative for the feel of heat on one’s feet.

In the 2003 work, Bornholm (Yellow Raft), Johnson turns an inflated lime-green inner tube, held by a sun-kissed child marching across white sand, into a geometric abstraction. The artist balances the composition with a large yellow rectangular raft held by another beachgoer. Both figures cast cool blue shadows, perfectly capturing the late-afternoon light of a sunny day at the beach. In a series of smaller canvases, Johnson eliminated the figures and zeroed in on geometric patterns, such as the radiating stripes of beach umbrellas.

Also on view were eight small canvases painted on the island of Bornholm, Denmark, that picture A-frame houses in bright blocks of color against flat blue skies. The clean, crisp homes looked intimate and inviting, but the landscapes seemed timeless and empty, forlorn in a way that recalls Edward Hopper’s small-town scenes.

Four small canvases depicting Italian construction workers against globes of color were less about the individuals than the work being performed, and they demonstrated how Johnson’s energetic brushwork lends itself to representing movement. Overall, the exhibition revealed the sure hand of a devoted colorist able to extract visual tension from the world around him."

Johnson’s career is often interpreted as a counterpoint to digital saturation in the art world. His commitment to analog processes and refusal to engage in social media marketing are part of a larger ethos of deliberate, human-scale authorship. Critics have viewed this as a response to the rise of generative AI and the increasing commodification of visual culture.

While many artists pursue digital virality, Johnson’s practice underscores intentionality, restraint, and consistency. His work, and the way it is presented, affirms the enduring value of independent vision in an increasingly data-driven cultural environment.

External Links

• Donald Kuspit, "Mitchell Johnson: Memorable Epiphanies," Whitehot Magazine, July 2023: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/memorable-epiphanies-by-donald-kuspit/6158

• Donald Kuspit, "Mitchell Johnson: Abstract Realism, Realistic Abstraction," Whitehot Magazine, April 2025: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/realistic-abstraction-by-donald-kuspit/5894

• Donald Kuspit, "Mitchell Johnson: Giant Paintings from New England, California and Newfoundland," Whitehot Magazine, March 2025: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/newfoundland-article-by-donald-kuspit/6858

• Peter Selz, Peter Selz Interviews Mitchell Johnson, Royal Danish Embassy, 2009: https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Selz-Interviews-Mitchell-Johnson/dp/0975402196

• Peter Selz, Interview with Mitchell Johnson, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/mitchell-johnson-interviews-15755

• Alexander Nemerov, "The Look of the World," Mitchell Johnson Paintings, 2020: https://mitchelljohnson.com/pages/writing

• Peter Campion has written extensively on Johnson, including essays in Mitchell Johnson: Color as Content (2015), Mitchell Johnson: The Space Between (2017), and Mitchell Johnson: The Present Tense (2021): https://mitchelljohnson.com/pages/writing

• Jesse Nathan, "The Hush of Held Breath," Artscope Magazine, September 2022: https://artscopemagazine.com/2022/09/the-hush-of-held-breath

• Jesse Nathan, "Nothing and Change," exhibition essay in Nothing and Change: Selected Paintings 1990–2022, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, 2022: https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Change-Selected-Paintings-1990-2022/dp/B0B9HDC6

• 
  

• Official website: https://mitchelljohnson.com

Mitchell Johnson Paintings in the April 7 issue of The New Yorker and the April 6 New York Times Magazine

 

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.

Education and Early Career

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.

Artistic Style and Philosophy

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.

Critical Reception

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.”

Exhibitions and Collections

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.

Public Exposure and Media

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.

Teaching

Once a year, Johnson teaches a master color class at Truro Center for the Arts.

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. ​

Blog

Johnson writes weekly about color theory, art history and the art world on Substack.

Personal Life

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 Paris Painting, Fifteen Windows, in the March 30, 2025 New York Times Magazine

Advertisement for the exhibition of Giant Paintings in San Francisco

 in the March 30, 2025 New York Times Magazine, page 15, across from The Ethicist.
 

Mitchell Johnson is exhibiting seven large-scale paintings in the lobby of the San Francisco skyscraper 425 Market Street from March 17 to May 30. Works include “Trinity East (Iceberg)” (2020–2024), 78×120 inches, made after a 2018 trip to Newfoundland, as well as three paintings of Johnson’s ongoing muse, the Presidio Park, with its peculiar, still-life-like collection of buildings. Seven sets of note cards accompany the exhibition and are for sale at Amazon and SFMOMA as well as other museums and bookstores.

The exhibition has been reviewed by Donald Kuspit in Whitehot Magazine in March, 2025.

Here is an excerpt of the Kuspit essay:

“Morandi and Albers are Johnson’s role models or mentors.  To my mind’s eye they are phenomenologists par excellence, which is what Johnson is at his best—as in these paintings–aspires to be, however unwittingly.  According to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception, “Phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy which places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is ‘already there.’  It is painstaking…in its attentiveness and wonder, its demand for awareness.”  As the philosopher John Cogan writes, in The Phenomenological Reduction, “There is an experience in which it is possible for us to come to the world with no knowledge or preconceptions in hand; it is the experience of astonishment…in the experience of astonishment, our everyday ‘knowing,’ when compared to the knowing that we experience in astonishment, is shown up as a pale epistemological imposter.”  At their best, when they [Johnson’s paintings] have a kind of parsimonious aesthetic intensity and nuanced exactitude, and no longer register as the “belief-performance of our customary life in the world,” they are astonishing masterpieces of phenomenological perception, fraught with what the philosopher George Santayana calls “hushed reverberations.”

Johnson's paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums as well as 700 private collections. His work has appeared in many feature films, most notably, Nancy Meyers films, The Holiday and It's Complicated. Seven paintings were also included in Crazy, Stupid, Love. Johnson's work is widely known because it has appeared in the New York Times Magazine over 200 times going back to 2012. Johnson has appeared on BFM Nice television in France and RAI 3 national television in Italy.

Mitchell Johnson Paintings in the 2025 WSJ Magazine

 

Mitchell Johnson "Giant Race Point Chair" painting in the March 2025 WSJ Magazine

Mitchell Johnson "Presidio #30" painting in the February 2025 WSJ Magazine

Mitchell Johnson is exhibiting seven large-scale paintings in the lobby of the San Francisco skyscraper 425 Market Street from March 17 to May 30. Works include “Trinity East (Iceberg)” (2020–2024), 78×120 inches, made after a 2018 trip to Newfoundland, as well as three paintings of Johnson’s ongoing muse, the Presidio Park, with its peculiar, still-life-like collection of buildings.

Read more about the exhibition in these articles in Hyperallergic, Whitehot Magazine and InMenlo.

Seven note card sets accompany the San Francisco exhibition and are available at Amazon, SFMOMA, Keplers Books, Explore Booksellers in Aspen and PAAM in Proincetown.

Mitchell Johnson Paintings in The New York Times Magazine January 5 and 19, 2025

 

Mitchell Johnson Positano Painting appears across from The Ethicist, Jan 19, 2025.

Mitchell Johnson Newfoundland Painting appears across from The Ethicist, Jan 5, 2025.

Click the image to enlarge.

New limited edition sets of boxed Mitchell Johnson notecards are available from Amazon.

Click to see the Amalfi set, the Newfoundland set.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Acquire Mitchell Johnson's Potrero Hill, 2004

Portero Hill, 2004,  9x12 inches, gouache on paper.

Click the image to see a larger version.

The Achenbach Foundation, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, acquired this painting in 2005.

©2004 Mitchell Johnson, gouache on paper, 9x12 inches, Collection of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Achenbach Foundation. Gift of Bruce and Julie Tenenbaum.

The painting is reproduced in the Mitchell Johnson monograph from 2004 that accompanied exhibits of Johnson's work at Terrence Rogers Fine Art in Santa Monica.

Mitchell Johnson San Francisco Boxed Notecards Set now available at Amazon and Bay Area Museum and Bookstores

 

San Francisco Boxed Notecards is set #7 of seven new Mitchell Johnson notecard sets being released in January, 2025. Each of these seven limited-edition boxed sets of notecards are beautifully designed and feature 20 blank cards of 5 different paintings (4 cards of each) and 20 blank envelopes. The seven themes in this series capture the gamut of places that inspire Johnson's work: Amalfi Coast, North Truro (Cape Cod), Paris, Maine, Race Point (Provincetown), Newfoundland and of course, San Francisco. The photos below, included with each Amazon listing, provide a clear description of the contents of the set you are considering. A biographical flysheet accompanies each set and the colorful notecards are printed on high quality stock and are perfect for writing correspondence and thank you notes. The San Francisco set includes compositions based on views from 1750 Taylor Street (Russian Hill), 555 California Street, Chinatown and the Presidio. Mitchell Johnson moved to Palo Alto, California from New York City in 1990 to work for the artist, Sam Francis. He settled in California after meeting his wife, author/chef Donia Bijan.

Mitchell Johnson studied painting, drawing and art history at Staten Island Academy, Randolph-Macon College, The Washington Studio School, The New York Studio School, The Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts and in 1990 received an MFA in Painting from Parsons School of Design in New York City. Johnson's paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums including Galleria Nazionale D'Arte Moderna in Rome, Museo Morandi in Bologna, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Achenbach Foundation in San Francisco and Bornholms Kunstmuseum in Denmark. A full list of museum collections is under the biography tab on his website. Johnson's paintings have appeared in numerous feature films including The Holiday (2006), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) and It's Complicated (2009). Johnson has been a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Borgo Finocchieto in Tuscany and The LeWitt House in Praiano, Italy.