“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.”
–Chris Busa Provincetown Arts 2012
Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill is pleased to present “Mitchell Johnson Sixteen Years in Truro”. This survey exhibit of 16 small paintings offers a chance to consider the impact of Cape Cod’s particular light and topography on the work of visiting artists.
Mitchell Johnson (b. 1964) divides his time between his studio in the Bay Area and his painting trips to New England, Europe and Asia. Throughout the 1990s, Johnson exhibited at major galleries in San Francisco (Hackett-Freedman, Campbell Thiebaud), New York (Tatistcheff Gallery), Santa Fe (Mitchell Brown Fine Art) and Los Angeles (Terrence Rogers Fine Art). Johnson has been a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome and The Albers Foundation. His work can be found in the permanent collections of 29 museums including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna, Rome and Museo Morandi, Bologna, Italy.
Johnson moved to the Bay Area in 1990 after finishing his MFA at Parsons where he studied with many former students of Hans Hofmann: Paul Resika, Larry Rivers, Nell Blaine, Wolf Kahn, Leland Bell, Robert DeNiro, Sr and Jane Freilicher.
On view September 7–17, 2021.
Digital catalog by request: mitchell.catalog@gmail.com
Additional images: @mitchell_johnson_artist