Mitchell Johnson, “Domino Sugar (Yellow Plane)” (1989-2025), 16 x 18 inches (© Mitchell Johnson)
Flea Street in Menlo Park, California, is exhibiting art by Mitchell Johnson from November 15 through December 20. Paintings from North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Morocco (Selected Work 1979-2025) showcases new works from Johnson’s recent trips to Brazil and Peru, as well as never-before-exhibited paintings from Morocco. Several very early works are also included for contextual support.
Johnson’s exploration of color perception and art history has been written about in articles by Donald Kuspit, Alexander Nemerov, and Susan Emerling. Most recently, on the occasion of the exhibition Twenty Years in Truro, Abraham Storer wrote in the Provincetown Independent about the importance of color perception in both Johnson’s painting and his annual master color class at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill:
“This September, in what has been an annual event for the past five years, Johnson taught a week-long workshop at Castle Hill in Truro and exhibited his paintings in the gallery there.
‘We’re not here to be creative,’ Johnson said to workshop participants on the first day of class. He approaches color like a technician. At the front of the class, he held up three pieces of different-colored paper attached like a scroll. A thin strip of green paper snaked across all the colors.
“Wow,” said one participant, reacting with awe to the way that the green strip looked dramatically different depending on the color it was seen against.
He continued with this lesson, placing a brown rectangle on a sheet of peach Color-aid paper — sheets used as a system for studying color theory. “It looks like the end of the world,” he said. The brown was a full stop on the light, buoyant ground. Then he put the rectangle on his sweater, a darker shade of brown. “Now, it’s the Sun,” he said.
Mitchell Johnson, “Peru (Ancon)” (2025), 16 x 20 inches (© Mitchell Johnson)
Donald Kuspit wrote in Whitehot Magazine in 2024:
“Where Cezanne 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.”
In a 2014 essay titled “Heir of Theirs: Mitchell Johnson and Fairfield Porter,” Alexander Nemerov wrote:
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.
In a 2004 ArtNews review of a show at Terrence Rogers Fine Art in Santa Monica, Susan Emerling wrote:
Mitchell Johnson’s latest oil paintings of European beach scenes are fresh and pleasing. Using large brushy strokes and bright, often improbable colors, Johnson gives dynamic form to everyday life with an Impressionist sensibility.
Mitchell Johnson’s paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums and have also appeared in numerous feature films, including The Holiday (2006), It’s Complicated (2009), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), and The Family McMullen (2025).
In March 2026, Johnson will exhibit work for the third time at Galerie Mercier in Paris.
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram @mitchell_johnson_artist.
Mitchell Johnson, “Medina Steps (Tangier)” (2025), 17 x 20 inches (© Mitchell Johnson)
