Sunday, November 17, 2024

Legacy in Continuum: Bay Area Figuration at Bakersfield Museum of Art March 22, 2012 - May 27, 2012

 

Mitchell Johnson "Torrenieri," 2011 22x26 inches, oil/canvas




     World War II shocked our global sense of reality. After 1945, artists of significance could no longer create recognizable images that had sustained the creative world for centuries. Figuration, which represented the world of the past, was obliterated; blocking, what seemed to be, all artistic roads. How were passionate artists to create? 
     Rather than working, as they had, with color, shape, line, and space to create traditional, recognizable subjects, in a known and conventional process, artists began to "deconstruct" art. They ripped aesthetic concepts apart, flattened the picture plane searching for a new painterly essence in unexplored territories. As their view of process became transformed, unexpected possibilities were revealed. They achieved immediacy with the newly invented acrylic paint, layering it in painting, drawing, collage and assemblage, and increasingly. in non-obiective images. They discovered unconventional methods and tools to build their art. In these radical processes, where aesthetic content was profoundly altered, artists discovered that color, shape, line, space, materials, and process could become their subject. They realized that when individual artistic components relate to each other in unaccustomed ways, they yield fresh abstract possibilities. Consequently, Abstract  Expressionism, as the orginal movement had been labeled, became the most expressive mode of the day. It was a complete reformation of the known artistic process and purpose. 
     In the San Francisco area, The Bay Area Figurative Artists expanded and integrated the thinking of the Abstract Expressions by seeing a profound connection between abstraction and figuration. Artists realized that their heritage need not be discarded: that it was possible to work in both modes simultaneously. Moreover, melding two forms of expression could be a metamorphosis yielding a perceptibly new aesthetic form. Certainly, this was no easy task. It requires that each artist develop an individual process while working in at least two modes of expression. Inevitably, when creating in two modes, the shadow of a third could possibly appear, giving increased richness to what might transpire, endowing art with greater sources of visual possibilities. 
     Courageously, the original Bay Area Figurative artists worked non-figuratively, often in an indeterminate space that emerged from vibrant strokes of their brush. Within this atmosphere, they brought back the figure, a subject, at that time, which was considered passé. David Park, an original Bay Area Figurative master, speaking for himself, but representing the vision of his colleagues "saw no distinction between nonobjective and figurative painting." Because it was a mode of expression that was an amalgam of non-traditional approaches, the first generation of Bay Area Figurative painters set a standard that could freely bring past and present together on the same canvas. 
     Today, more than 60 years later, there are approximately three generations of Bay Area Figurative artists and growing. They no longer come only from the Bay Area, but  from many places in the USA and the world. These contemporary artists have carved out paths that evolved in different and individual ways, based on the uniqueness of each artist, his or her life's influences, and the social milieu. With each generation, tied in part to the original artistic philosophy, the movement changes and the art broadens, becoming more global in scope and direction. Evident in this exhibition is a continuum. Contemporary artists reference and personalize powerful aspect of the original philosophy. They prove, in this art exhibition, that contemporary Bay Area Figurative art, founded originally by the most insightful of artists, continues to be even more expansive and vibrant with the increase of artists drawn to it and with each new work of art they create. Roberta Carasso, Ph.D. Elected member of the International Art Critics Association. Student of original Abstract Expressionist artists - Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Hans Hofmann. Selected as a private painting student of Willem de Kooning. 
-Roberta Carasso, Ph.D. 

Legacy in Continuum: Bay Area Figuration at the Bakersfield Museum of Art March 22, 2012-May 27, 2012 was curated by Vikki L. Cruz featured paintings by Nathan Oliveira, Dennis Hare, Paul Wonner, Suhas Bhujbal, Elmer Bischoff, Kim Frohsin, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Brown, Mitchell Johnson, John Goodman, Siddharth Parasnis, and Theophilus Brown.



Saturday, November 9, 2024

Hans Hofmann's Mixed Messages, a 1990 article by Wolf Kahn (1927-2020)

I posted this a few years ago on the occasion of Wolf Kahn's passing at 92 years of age. This article he wrote about Hans Hofmann for the October, 1990 Art in America really taught me something important. This article had a strong impact on me when I read it in Sam Francis's studio in Palo Alto, CA just weeks after leaving NYC in the fall of 1990. I had studied at the Parsons graduate painting program founded by Paul Resika, the second generation of the Hofmann School Wolf writes about. Two years later I studied with Wolf in New Mexico at the Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts. Hope you enjoy the article. (If you click on the photos you'll get a high res image that is readable.) Wolf made wonderful contributions to the art world and to art history. He'll be sorely missed for his unique and inspired color. The great photos in this article are courtesy of one of Hofmann's other students, Albert Kresch.








Sunday, August 11, 2024

Mitchell Johnson Amalfi Painting, Praiano, 28x40 inches

 

"Praiano," 2024 28x40 inches oil/canvas.

I made two painting trips to the Amalfi Coast in 2024. I stayed in Praiano, the village between Positano and Amalfi in February and March, when there is less tourism, but it's still possible to have mild days with gorgeous sun and changing light. The days are short but painting outside is possible if there's no wind, and you don't have to get up as early to catch the sunrise.

Praiano has lots of white buildings and houses and the very early light briefly turns the white into a mysterious honey color. Shadows on the white buildings can be unbelievably blue. 

For my second trip I stayed at the LeWitt Collection, a house called Casa L'Orto, which is the family home of Carol LeWitt. My residency was connected to Marea Art Projects which arranges host situations for visual artists, writers and musicians during the winter months when Costiera experiences a brief lull in traffic and visitors.

My residency at Casa L'Orto was included in an episode of the RAI 3 program, Generazione Bellezza.



Mitchell Johnson and Emilio Casalini in Praiano, February, 2024



Monday, July 29, 2024

Mitchell Johnson Paintings in The New York Times Magazine June 30 and July 14, 2024

 





Both of these ads appeared across from The Ethicist column in the print New York Times Magazine June 30 and July 14, 2024. Mitchell's paintings have appeared in the NY Times over 200 times since 2012.

Find out what paintings are currently available by emailing: mitchell.catalog@gmail.com.





Friday, July 12, 2024

H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco visits exhibition "La Revelation de Meyreuil" at Musee Villa Les Camelias

 

Mitchell Johnson and H.S.H. at Villa Les Camelias July 3, 2024


Villa Les Camelias had a tenth anniversary celebration July 3, 2024 in Cap d'Ail, France, and in attendance was H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco. Mitchell Johnson and Prince Albert did a color changing exercise during the visit. The exhibition "La Revelation de Meyreuil" is on view at Musee Villa Les Camelias through September 29, 2024.

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

New Painting - "Pink Chair," 2022-2024 36x24 inches

 

Pink Chair (Race Point), 2024, 36x24 inches, oil on canvas. © 2024 Mitchell Johnson. 

I’ve been interested in the beach for as long as I can remember. It took a while to realize that what was intriguing me is the way man-made color separates from the backdrop of sky, water and sand. Even without the strong light of a sunny day, the dreamy space at the beach is unlike any other. Perhaps that’s what calls so many people to the seaside.

 

When I include umbrellas, towels or chairs in a composition, I’m turning them into paintings, I'm using them to talk about painterly space. As Deborah Butterfield put it so well on the occasion of her new exhibit of sculptures: "P.S. these are not horses".

 

P.S. these are not beach chairs.

 

As much as a painting might begin referencing a chair right in front of me, or a photo I carefully arranged, the chairs in the paintings never really exist. The Pink Chair in this post was in fact a blue chair I saw on Cape Cod and was able to draw and paint from life. Then in the studio, the color of the stripes kept changing until the stripes were completely covered and painted dull pink. The dull pink chair sat around the studio for months, sometimes it was turned to the wall, sometimes it was staring at me from across the room. Finally while mixing an orange for a new painting, a voice in my head sent me to get the painting and quickly I reworked the stripes finally achieving the right combination of clarity and surprise in the colors.


In 2012, the writer Chris Busa, described this process in an article for Provincetown Arts:

“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.”

 

 

Mitchell Johnson Five Chairs (Race Point) painting on the back cover of July 1, 2024 New Yorker Magazine