Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Tuesday, January 9, 2024
"Luxembourg," 2022 appears in both the January 15, 2024 New Yorker Magazine and the February print issue of Artforum
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| "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  |
Saturday, January 6, 2024
Mitchell Johnson Exhibit "La révélation de Meyreuil" at Musée de la Villa les Camélias, Cap d'Ail / May 17-September 29, 2024
Save the date, May 17, 2024 is the opening of the retrospective exhibit, "La révélation de Meyreuil",
at Musée de la Villa les Camélias, Cap d'Ail, France. The exhibit runs May 17-September 29, 2024."In 1989, at the age of 25, Mitchell Johnson left New York for his first trip to Europe — a voyage that would launch a lifetime of interaction with color. Landing in Gotland, Sweden, and making his way south to Meyreuil, France, he was drawn to and overwhelmed by the new landscapes and unfamiliar colors and patterns. Driven by a powerful instinct to translate what he saw into paintings, he returned again and again to work on location and to study in museums."
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| "Meyreuil Fiat," 1989 6x12 inches oil/panel |
You can read more about the exhibit in this review by Donad Kuspit at Whitehot Magazine
and also in this article at Hyperallergic.
Monday, September 25, 2023
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.
Follow on instagram.
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.
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.
Mitchell Johnson books and catalogs are available at Amazon.
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.
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