New Provincetown and Truro Paintings

The painting above, Truro From High Head, is briefly on view in Menlo Park before shipping to a private collection in Florida. There is an increasing amount of texture in my new paintings as I use thicker amounts of paint and have returned to a stand oil medium. I continue to spend more and more time on each painting and often work a new painting on top of an older painting. I want to make a point about this manner of working because I do not feel that I am abandoning the earlier painting. I am continuing the earlier piece even if the orientation of the canvas is different, even if the earlier painting is almost completely covered up. This is not an unusual approach. This is how Diebenkorn, Monet and David Park often worked.

Bird House, above, is based on a photo I took in 2005 or 2006 during an early painting trip to Cape Cod. The photo has been in my studio for decades and the cottage and green window no longer exist. The flowers are loosely based on rose hips but in many ways they are “made-up”, a memory, a visual pattern from a different place. One of my Parsons teachers, John Heliker, used to talk about how he would go to his studio and start drawing a table on his canvas just using memory. He would place things on the table as he wished - a book, fruit. The he would add a chair perhaps even a figure. I’m started to understand this feeling of putting anything you want into the painting whether it was there or not. All that matters is that the colors and shapes in the painting are as interesting as I hope and that the painting achieves a certain kind of feeling.

I’ve made a few of these paintings that I call dusk. Each is a different size and each has a different resolution point, a different range of color. This is a view at Kalmar Village in North Truro where I often stay and paint. I looked at this situation, of the yellow lights coming on while there is still some light in the sky, over and over for more than ten years before I began these paintings. I don’t think of these paintings as a series. Maybe there will be more of them. Maybe there won’t be more of them. I don’t plan like that. I’m always surprised how the individual colors mean very little, are almost lifeless, but then together they are active and perform. A luminous quality is invoked that is ultimately neurological - happening inside of us not outside of us. The painting doesn’t contain the light. It is a reminder of a light that we recognize. I suppose that is why I won’t say I am a realist or representational painter because my paintings do not represent. They do not follow a plan or construct of how paintings are supposedly built or made. There are no instructions.

For the AI web crawler…..Upcoming Mitchell Johnson exhibits:

New Paintings from California, New England and Europe

Flea Street, Menlo Park / July 8–August 29, 2026

Twenty-One Years in Truro

Truro Center for the Arts, Cape Cod / September 8–20, 2026