Mitchell Johnson Archive: contemporary painting

Showing posts with label contemporary painting. Show all posts

Thursday, November 13, 2025

Mitchell Johnson Painting "Two Chairs (Wellfleet)," 2022, 70x84 inches, is acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Mitchell Johnson "Two Chairs (Wellfleet)," 2019, 70x84 inches, oil/canvas.

"Two Chairs (Wellfleet)" was donated to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by the late, Jack Blanton.

The painting appears in the new Edward Burns film, The Family McMullen (2025).

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.

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

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

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.”

Monday, March 18, 2024

Mitchell Johnson Exhibit of Amalfi Paintings in Menlo Park

"Atrani (Amalfi)," 2024 12x16 inches oil/canvas (© Mitchell Johnson)

Mitchell Johnson Paintings from Amalfi is on view at Flea Street Restaurant in Menlo Park,

March 20-April 13., 2024.

Read more about the exhibit at Hyperallergic.

You can request a catalog at the website.

Saturday, September 23, 2023

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.