From January 10 by means of February 15, Flea Avenue Restaurant in Menlo Park, California, is exhibiting the color- and shape-driven work of Bay Space artist Mitchell Johnson. Titled Work from Maine, Italy, Newfoundland, and San Francisco, the present options current work that proceed the artist’s exploration of colour, notion, familiarity, and scale. Whether or not by means of the inclusion of bridges, icebergs, lifeguard chairs, skyscrapers, or iconic views, Johnson straddles illustration and abstraction to touch upon the act of seeing and reveal his love of artwork historical past.
In 2014, Stanford artwork historian Alexander Nemerov wrote an essay, “Heir of Theirs: Mitchell Johnson and Fairfield Porter,” for the monograph Colour as Content material. 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 greater than as melodramatic indications of heroic inventive battle. Johnson is neither making a superficial pastiche nor waging an epic battle to win a method of his personal. Each these artwork historic tales make little sense when his artwork.
As a substitute his work are achieved—that phrase, “achieved,” indicating a quiet and intense transit by means of the work of those different artists. That transit is a response and a correspondence between him and them, a felt connection, that leaves us outward indicators of affinity, certain, but additionally a extra elusive sense that Johnson is aware of these artists from the within. And if that’s the case, then what is enjoyable about Johnson’s artwork is extra precisely the presence of Bonnard and firm, for any achieved artwork reminiscent of Johnson’s will carry inside itself, as indicators of its seriousness, not simply references to earlier artists however one thing intrinsic or important to their footage. What is enjoyable, then, is that one thing important would seem to reside on, previous these earlier painters’ long-ago deaths, within the artwork of this inheritor of theirs working in our personal time. One such artist dwelling in Johnson’s work is one other of his acknowledged masters, Fairfield Porter.”
Mitchell Johnson “Presidio #20 (Porch)” (2024), 22 x 26 inches, oil on canvas (© Mitchell Johnson, 2025)
Donald Kuspit wrote about Johnson’s work in WhiteHot Journal 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 work are within the everlasting collections of over 35 museums and have appeared ceaselessly within the New York Occasions Journal, the New Yorker, and WSJ Journal. They’ve additionally appeared in quite a few characteristic movies together with The Vacation (2006) and Loopy, Silly, Love (2011).
Mitchell Johnson “Bonavista (Blue Iceberg)” (2024), 20 x 30 inches, oil on canvas (© Mitchell Johnson, 2025)
