From January 10 through February 15, Flea Street Restaurant in Menlo Park, California, is exhibiting the color- and shape-driven work of Bay Area artist Mitchell Johnson. Titled Paintings from Maine, Italy, Newfoundland, and San Francisco, the show features recent paintings that continue the artist’s exploration of color, perception, familiarity, and scale. Whether through the inclusion of bridges, icebergs, lifeguard chairs, skyscrapers, or iconic views, Johnson straddles representation and abstraction to comment on the act of seeing and reveal his love of art history.
In 2014, Stanford art historian Alexander Nemerov wrote an essay, “Heir of Theirs: Mitchell Johnson and Fairfield Porter,” for the monograph Color as Content. His two opening paragraphs:
“A pleasing thing about Mitchell Johnson’s paintings is how they suggest other artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Giorgio Morandi, and Josef Albers. The references are pleasing because they do not come across as superficial signs of “influence” any more than as melodramatic indications of heroic artistic struggle. Johnson is neither creating a superficial pastiche nor waging an epic battle to win a style of his own. Both those art historical stories make little sense when looking at his art.
Instead his paintings are achieved—that word, “achieved,” indicating a quiet and intense transit through the work of these other artists. That transit is a response and a correspondence between him and them, a felt connection, that leaves us outward signs of affinity, sure, but also a more elusive sense that Johnson knows these artists from the inside. And if that is the case, then what is pleasing about Johnson’s art is more exactly the presence of Bonnard and company, for any achieved art such as Johnson’s will carry within itself, as signs of its seriousness, not just references to previous artists but something intrinsic or essential to their pictures. What is pleasing, then, is that something essential would appear to live on, past those earlier painters’ long-ago deaths, in the art of this heir of theirs working in our own time. One such artist living in Johnson’s paintings is another of his acknowledged masters, Fairfield Porter.”
Donald Kuspit wrote about Johnson’s work in WhiteHot Magazine in 2024:
“Johnson is a master of abstraction, as his oddly constructivist paintings show, but of unconscious feeling, for his geometry serves to contain and with that control the strong feelings implicit in his strong colors. Apart from that, his paintings are art historically important, because they seamlessly fuse abstraction and realism, which Kandinsky tore apart to the detriment of both even as he recognized that they were implicitly inseparable, tied together in a Gordian knot, as they masterfully are in Johnson’s paintings.”
Johnson’s paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums and have appeared frequently in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and WSJ Magazine. They have also appeared in numerous feature films including The Holiday (2006) and Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011).
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
