Mitchell Johnson "Three Chairs (Amagansett)" painting in the September 10, 2023 New York Times Magazine

 

This New York Times Magazine ad was for the September, 2023 exhibit, It Takes Time, at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Truro, Massachusetts. The exhibit was reviewed by the legendary art critic, Donald Kuspit in WhiteHot Magazine. You can read the review here.

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www.mitchelljohnson.com

Mitchell Johnson books and catalogs are available at Amazon.

Mitchell Johnson Painting "Presidio #5" in September 4, 2023 New Yorker Magazine

 

This New Yorker Magazine ad was for the September, 2023 exhibit, It Takes Time, at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Truro, Massachusetts. The exhibit was reviewed by the legendary art critic, Donald Kuspit in WhiteHot Magazine. You can read the review here.

Follow on instagram.

www.mitchelljohnson.com

Mitchell Johnson books and catalogs are available at Amazon.

Mitchell Johnson Three Chairs Painting in September, 2023 WSJ Magazine Women's Fashion Issue

 

This WSJ ad was for the September, 2023 exhibit, It Takes Time, at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Truro, Massachusetts. The exhibit was reviewed by the legendary art critic, Donald Kuspit in WhiteHot Magazine. You can read the review here.

Follow on instagram.

www.mitchelljohnson.com

Mitchell Johnson books and catalogs are available at Amazon.

Mitchell Johnson Exhibit "Are You Going With Me?" at Res Ipsa Gallery Oakland June, 2012

 

Are You Going With Me?

Known primarily as a colorist working in the vein of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Mitchell Johnson has for many years simultaneously pursued two distinct bodies of work: one representational and the other purely abstract. Recently, Johnson's work has taken an exciting new turn, combining the two approaches on individual canvases. Are You Going With Me? is the first exhibition of this new body of work.

MITCHELL JOHNSON: No matter where my family was living:

Kansas, New York, Virginia.. whenever I walked in the door after school, I was greeted by the sound of my mother teaching piano. Now that my son Luca plays piano, I am reminded that I grew up with a remarkable range of music around me-from the Beethoven, Handel and Satie that was inevitably there-to the Led Zeppelin and Pat Metheny that I chose on my own. For all of the possibility of color and shape that I explore in my paintings, there is also a powerful influence of music assisting in my efforts to reach new territory. I have named one of the paintings in this show Are You Going with Me? after the 1982 composition from the Pat Metheny Group because of the remarkable journey the painting traveled before reaching its current stasis. Recently, when Luca was practicing "Für Elise" for an upcoming recital, I surprised him (and myself) as I joined him on the piano bench and playfully layered strange notes on top of his piece just as I had done with my mother when I was Luca's age. It occurred to me that the collage of flat colors I have been applying over my landscapes and compositions is the visual equivalent to the strange sounds Luca and I were generating as we made nonsense of Beethoven. We weren't being disrespectful or even trying to be humorous. Instead, there was something very complex, adventurous and exciting about the result, and that was enough.

In these new paintings, the collaged flat areas of color disrupt a literal reading of the landscapes underneath, playing the role of Johnson's improvised random notes over his son's music. While the representational images and color grids battle for prominence, it is difficult to determine whether the color is providing context for the image or the image is providing context for the color.

-Jonathan Ball, Director

Res Ipsa Gallery

May, 2012

John Seed reviewed the exhibit in The Huffington Post.

The printed catalog occasionally shows up at Amazon.

Mitchell Johnson Paintings on the back cover of the April 3, 2023 New Yorker

 

Request a catalog of available work by emailing: mitchell.catalog @gmail.com.

Click here to order the paperback "Mitchell Johnson Nothing and Change".

Mitchell Johnson Paintings on Back Cover of January 30, 2023 New Yorker Magazine

 

We have no way of knowing the true range of personality a single color may possess.

New Yorker Magazine January 30, 2023

Mitchell Johnson Painting in Truro May, 2005

If you click on the Truro painting above, you'll get a better quality image; the painting is called "Green Umbrella (North Truro)," 2023 24x38 inches, oil on canvas. These cottages in the painting still exist but they've changed and been renovated and I don't find them quite as interesting as they currently appear in the flesh. Fortunately, I have my memories and photos and can paint them as I wish. I drive by them several times each day when I visit North Truro in May and September. There was something innocent about the rough white exterior when I first started drawing them and painting them in 2005. The simple bands of sky, water and sand peeking out between the weathered siding behaved like an abstract painting. The triumvirate of sky, water, sand change color all day shifting appearance. Some days the sky disappears into the water. Other days the shade on the wood siding can merge completely with the dull gray water.  Around noon, when the tide is in, I've seen the deep water go to black next to the white siding. The endless combinations of color and light free me to combine any pieces of paint, any colors with any others.

The cottages are part of a group called Sutton Place that are characteristic of the area, Beach Point, that was frequently photographed by Joel Meyerowitz in the late 1970s. When I first stayed at Beach Point in May, 2005, I had no idea I was in Edward Hopper country.  In fact, I arrived on the Cape under the spell of some Europeans. Just weeks before driving into Truro I had visited an unusual exhibit of Josef Albers paintings installed next to Giorgio Morandi paintings at the Museo Morandi in Bologna, Italy. (There's a section in my book, Color as Content, where I recreate some of these Albers/Morandi pairings.) 

The cottages surely triggered something from my past like they do for everyone. Something about my Grandmother's house in Tampa, Florida or maybe something about beach houses I had stayed in as a child at Fort Story in Virginia or Fort Hancock in New Jersey. But most importantly they seemed connected to what happens when you see an Albers painting two feet away from a Morandi painting.  And they seemed connected to the objects that Morandi overlapped again and again in his discussions of personal relationships and perception. In 2005 my work was changing from impressionistic landscapes of France and Italy and responding to the Albers/Morandi encounter. For the first time, I was consciously filling the canvas with larger shapes: windows, buildings, distilled planes of sky, field or water. The views in North Truro dovetailed perfectly with my desire to find a new way to compose paintings and a search for a more complex feeling.

I often turn to photos from the Cape for compositional ideas when I am in the studio. In the Truro painting above, it may be hard to believe that the band of dull blue gray water is the exact same color on the right where it is a dark wedge separating the cottages and then on the left where it displays differently. Any given color has numerous faces, numerous roles, even in the same painting.  This is the point of the Truro paintings. Inside the window frame, the dark blue glows and luminously recedes as it battles the deep green square surrounding it. We have no way of knowing the true range of personality a single color may possess.