mitchell johnson california artist

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It’s been a while since I’ve released any new paintings from Italy. I spent part of October painting around Siena and this friday – November 5, my studio will be open from 11:30-1:00 if you want to see some of this new work. Please e-mail me and I will send the address.

I’m very excited to be the first artist in residence at Borgo Finocchieto near Montalcino and Buonconvento. This area is where I first stayed when I began painting in southern Tuscany nearly twenty years ago. I will also be the program advisor for this new residency program so any mid-career artists who have an attachment to Tuscany can e-mail me and I will put them on the list for a possible residency in 2011 and 2012. The Borgo residency is by invitation only.

Twenty of my paintings are in a new exhibit, Mitchell Johnson: Selected paintings 1990-2010 at the Thornhill Gallery at Avila University in Kansas City. The show is up August 27-September 23, 2010. I will be there for the CLOSING RECEPTION on thursday September 23 from 5-8pm. New catalogs are now available.

In 2008 I volunteered to re-edit Susan Larsen’s interviews with Richard Diebenkorn. The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian sent me cassettes and I listened to Diebenkorn talk while working in my studio and driving in the car. It took weeks to carefully comb the transcripts, but it was fascinating to hear Diebenkorn’s thoughtfulness with each response. The one important error I identified, and I don’t know how many years it was in the Smithsonian transcript, is when Larsen asks Diebenkorn about his early visits to DC to see Duncan Phillips’ museum and in particular the American Moderns in that collection. Strangely, Kandinsky was substituted for Knaths in the original transcription masking Diebenkorn’s double mention of Knaths. This intrigued me partially because my teachers Paul Resika and Leland Bell were fans of Knaths. Would art historians have found the combination of Marin and Kandinsky strange in a discussion of American Modernsim? The point is that while Diebenkorn aligned Knaths with Marin and Matisse and Bonnard the attention he drew to Knaths’s work was lost for years since few people hear the actual interview while doing research. I imagine the Knaths historians would be happy to know. Susan Larsen told me in an e-mail that there is no connection between the incorrect appearance of Kandinsky in the 1985 interview transcript and her mention of Kandinsky in the subsequent 1987 Diebenkorn oral history interview.

A group of my large abstract paintings are now installed at 50 California Street in San Francisco. The exhibit is open to the public and will be there through mid-November.

Yesterday was the first time I have seen a large group of Richard Diebenkorn’s work since editing the Susan Larsen interviews for the Archives of American Art last summer. Many of the pieces in this show at Paul Thiebaud Gallery are very familiar to Diebenkorn fans, but this is a rare chance to see them together, in person, where their connectedness can often surprise and intrigue. Diebenkorn is well known for his desire to achieve a “tension beneath calm” and though some claim this was mostly achieved in his enormous Ocean Park canvases, the range of drawings and paintings from Christopher Diebenkorn’s personal collection, reminds us that from very early out, Diebenkorn was determined to reconcile abstract expressionism’s shortcomings with the help of Matisse. Because the show is not overly curated we can see that for all of the disciplined periods Diebenkorn travelled, he was always in touch with whim and instinct. Unlike, the detached, brand-like abstraction of Clifford Still, this intimate show quickly establishes that Diebenkorn was continually searching, emotionally engaged and never an advocate of style. One of the most striking moments of the Larsen interviews (and relevant to this show) is when Diebenkorn acknowledges that artists of the generations to follow him might never understand the violence he found and relied upon in Cezanne; Cezanne is too familiar to us. Likewise one must wonder if we can see for ourselves how challenging the pieces in this gem of a show were for Diebenkorn’s own time.

Twenty four of my paintings are installed at the Royal Danish Embassy in Washington, DC through mid-April. Viewing is by appointment. There will be an RSVPreception on saturday, March 6, 1:30-3:30. Please e-mail me if you wish to attend the reception. Because of security, you will need to be on the guest list.

The photo above is from the Nancy Meyers article in the sunday New York Times Magazine. One of my early landscapes from Meyreuil, France is just behind Nancy’s head in the photo above. My painting “Truro,” 2006 appeared in Nancy Meyers film,The Holiday. Thanks to my rep, Jennifer Long, at Film Art LA, Nancy Meyers‘ latest film, It’s Complicated, also features three Mitchell Johnson paintings. You can see a better picture of the set in this Washington Post article that features another one of my Meyreuil landscapes.

I made some notes on this painting of Volterra when I saw it in the Louvre two years ago. Volterra isn’t far from the apartment I rent in southern Tuscany and I can tell you that it still looks like this painting. I uploaded this Corot jpeg as large as possible to try to make a couple of points about how the painting might have been conceived. First off, without repeating my thoughts on Corot from an earlier post, I want to continue the idea of zones in the painting and how important they are for Corot and his approach to composition. There are a lot of devices in this painting that encourage us to circulate and travel through the picture. The circulation Corot achieves relies on the tension between sky and town, town and wood, wood and foreground. The mass of wood contrasts with the small and distant buildings and just enough tree trunks have been included that the trunks act like worms breaking up the deep green mass ensuring we don’t get trapped there. Intricate Volterra becomes a still-life pressed between two large shapes: green and sky. Were the tree trunks actually in the positions noted or did Corot introduce them all the while spacing the trunks like notes of music? Approaching Volterra with the idea of Corot as master editor offers further ideas. He isn’t just telling us about Volterra’s particular quality or look – he’s using Volterra as a vehicle for discussing how exciting and engaging paintings can be and how complex visual perception is. Thinking about the 38 year old Corot traveling through Italy carefully selecting and organizing views, seeking inspiration, helps one appreciate Corot’s impact on art history and those who followed him. It is also interesting to consider that Cezanne wouldn’t be born for another five years as this painting was being made. Yet Corot was already defining a new approach to painting and his concern for the plastic decisions in his work paved the way not only for Impressionism but most importantly for Cezanne’s mature work and even for the flat, quilt like color of Vuillard. Could there be a Cezanne or a Vuillard without Corot? There certainly wouldn’t be any Modernism without Cezanne and Vuillard.