Color, shape and form take center stage in Mitchell Johnson: Nothing and Change, Selected Paintings 1990-2022 at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. A celebrated colorist, Mitchell brings a playful eye to scenes of Truro, Massachusetts. In North Truro Red, the only red in the painting is the bright edge of a welcome mat outside a luminous white home. Mitchell lets the blues dominate in this deceptively titled painting. The red is like a little wink from the artist, as if to ask, ‘what’s the true subject here?’ Bonavista Yellow (Iceberg), oil on linen, 18 x 24"

While viewers might project a story onto a Mitchell painting, the artist’s goal is not narrative. “I don’t get too involved in allegory or story,” he says. Instead he wants people to notice what is included and what’s left out. “Don’t forget this is a painting. It’s a surface somebody made,” he says. “We do the same thing when we look around. We visually organize the room or the world. We take notice of some things and don’t see others.”

In Bonavista Yellow (Iceberg) the eye is drawn immediately to the bright yellow of the foregrounded cottage. But behind the cottage looms an iceberg, onto which the cottage’s shadow seems to be cast. What is going on here? Is there a story? Or is the painting a collection of blocks of color all playing off one another, colliding, as it were, like an iceberg on a crash course with a coastal village? Like his forebear Edward Hopper, Mitchell creates cinematic scenes, suggestive yet open to interpretation. Mitchell’s lush brushwork invites the viewer to linger and offers new insights with each encounter. Trinity East, oil on linen, 16 x 20"

In Luxembourg Two (Sunset) various figures cross a promenade in the famed Parisian Jardin du Luxembourg. The closest figure strides purposefully, while a couple ahead of her amble. The time of day and wintry overtones suggest people might be hurrying home after work, or leisurely catching the last light of the day. That was not Mitchell’s concern. His focus is the creamy white ground, the bright red rectangle of a woman’s purse, an insistent patch of green at the top edge of the painting. And, most dramatically, the elongated ghost-shaped shadows of the figures.  North Truro Red, oil on linen, 24 x 36"

Johnson studied at Parsons School of Design in the 1980s, alongside Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Nell Blaine, Paul Resika, Larry Rivers, and Robert De Niro Sr., among other notable artists. His work is in the collections of numerous private collections and museums, including Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Tucson Museum of Art, Longwood Center for the Visual Arts and the Museo Morandi in Bologna, Italy.

The Museo Morandi is one of his favorite museums. It was there that he had a watershed moment in 2005 when he visited an exhibit that paired Giorgio Morandi’s work with that of Josef Albers. In Albers’ nested chromatic squares and Morandi’s enjambment of vases and everyday objects, Mitchell saw echoes of his own obsessions. “In some ways what I was doing was melding their visions in order to better articulate my own voice,” he says. Luxembourg Two (Sunset), oil on linen, 24 x 36"

The selection of work on view at Castle Hill charts Mitchell’s journey to fine-tune that voice. For Mitchell, a beach chair or a handbag or a quaint cottage are props. His conversation is art historical, investigating what Albers called the “interaction of color.” It’s an invitation to viewers to deepen their own understanding of the visual world. —

Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill  
10 Meetinghouse Road • Truro, MA 02666 •
(508) 349-7511 • www.castlehill.org 

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