Artist Statement
My primary interest is color behavior and color perception. I use familiar views and things to explore the experience of color. Over fifty years my subjects have changed, from abstractions, still lifes, figures and interiors to the streets of San Francisco, New York, Paris and the coast of New England. But what compels me to paint has not. Whether a painting will be recognized as Paris or any other specific place, what matters to me is how the painting itself will unfold, look and behave. My compositions inevitably carry an allegory, even a nostalgia, that belongs to the viewer, but my concerns are essentially formal and tied to the painting itself, not its imagery. I suppose my endless intrigue with color frees my subconscious to place whatever it is in my paintings that makes them familiar to viewers and recognizably my own.
About the Artist
Mitchell Johnson (b. 1964) is an American painter known for his use of color. He began painting as a teenager at Staten Island Academy and studied painting, drawing and art history at the Washington Studio School and Randolph-Macon College before earning an MFA from Parsons School of Design in 1990, where he studied with Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Paul Resika, Larry Rivers and Robert De Niro Sr. He was an artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in 2007.
His paintings are in 40 museum collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Crocker Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Cape Cod Museum of Art and the Museo Morandi in Bologna. He has had retrospectives at the Bakersfield Museum of Art (2014) and the Musée Villa les Camélias in Cap d'Ail, France (2023). Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Mercier, Paris (2025 and 2026); and Twenty-One Years in Truro at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill (2026), where he also teaches an annual master color class. His paintings have appeared in the films The Holiday, It's Complicated and Crazy, Stupid, Love. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
High-resolution images and interviews are available on request. More at mitchelljohnson.com.