Mitchell Johnson has been painting for 45 years and has more than 35 paintings in museum collections in the United States and Europe. His work incorporates imagery but it is ultimately abstract. The the colors and shapes are the focus, not an allegory, sense of place or concern for three dimensionality.
Louvre (Courbet), 2025, oil on canvas, 14 x 29"
The artist says, “The way I work has been best described by Chris Busa of 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.’”
Seven Pickets (Puddle), 2024-2025, oil on canvas, 38 x 28"
In addition, in 2024, renowned art critic, Donald Kuspit wrote in Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art: “Where Cézanne was a proto-modernist, making representational works that were implicitly abstract, Johnson is a post-modernist, making abstract works that are implicitly—often explicitly—representational. He is a master of both modes, seamlessly integrating them to memorable effect, for memory at its most insistent is an abstract representation—an aesthetic epiphany.”
Presidio (Blue Table), 2025, oil on canvas, 24 x 20"
Johnson will be featured in two summer group shows at the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, Massachusetts. Visit the artist’s website for details. —
Want to See More?
(650) 537-1493 | www.mitchelljohnson.com
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