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.