Mitchell Johnson Archive: New Yorker Magazine

Showing posts with label New Yorker Magazine. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Mitchell Johnson Paintings in The New Yorker Magazine 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.

Friday, April 4, 2025

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.

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

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

Monday, June 3, 2024

Mitchell Johnson Paintings on back cover of May 27, 2024 New Yorker Magazine

May 27, 2024 New Yorker Magazine

Monday, May 6, 2024

Mitchell Johnson Luxembourg painting on backcover of January 15, 2024 New Yorker Magazine

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Mitchell Johnson Faroe Islands Painting in the December 4, 2023 New Yorker Magazine

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

"Luxembourg," 2022 appears in both the January 15, 2024 New Yorker Magazine and the February print issue of Artforum

"Luxembourg," 2022 16x16 inches oil/canvas

This painting, "Luxembourg," 2022, appears in both the January 15, 2024 issue of the New Yorker and the February issue of Artforum Magazine. If you click on the image above you'll see a higher quality photo that you can zoom in on to see the paint, the surface. This little kiosk in the Luxembourg garden has intrigued me for years but I only recently made a few paintings of it. When I first went to France in 1989 I was in Paris briefly and I would go for very long runs that often went through the Luxembourg and I'm pretty sure that's the first time I saw this kiosk. Like all of my paintings, this isn't so much a record of what was there as it is a jumping off point for some shapes and colors that I'm assembling that feel mysterious, baffling, complex. The chair could be any color, any location - whatever the painting needs. The way that the painting is built, the touch of the paint application are both very important and have evolved over 40 years. Each are impossible to consciously strategize or control. The painting may not work and it might get destroyed. Time will tell.

I talk about my painting process at length in various interviews. See Savvy Painter, Painting Perceptions, Huffington Post, I Like Your Work Podcast, Studio Break Podcast.

Donald Kuspit has written a lot about my work and you can read two of his essays at Whitehot Magazine.

There are two exhibits in 2024:

January-February, 2024
Selected Work 1988-2024
Flea Street Menlo Park

May 17-September 29, 2024
La révélation de Meyreuil, an exhibition of 50 small paintings
Musée de la Villa les Camélias in Cap d’Ail, France

Monday, April 3, 2023

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".

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

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.