Color As Content

Letter from the Curator

A work of art can stay with a person for a variety of reasons. Perhaps a painting is built into the societal, historical, or cultural fabric. It could be a visceral connection to the work's surface, intention, or viewing it in a remarkable environment. Often, an object instills a definitive moment shifting a viewer's contextual understanding of theory, history, or the experience of others. Each justifiably allows a piece of art, exhibition, or museum to leave a lasting impression. Once a piece of art solidifies in the memory, it becomes a reference point for understanding the world around us. As a Curator, each exhibition provides a new subset of understandings, and while each artist expounds upon the one before, some artists play a profound role. California-based artist Mitchell Johnson's paintings are at the forefront of my understanding of the visual world.

I was first introduced to Johnson's work while on display in 2012 in BMoA's group exhibition Legacy in Continuum: Bay Area Figuration, which positioned his work in the multi-generational Bay Area Figurative movement. And then in greater context with his 2015 solo exhibition Color as Content: a 25 Year Survey. Since the 2015 show, I have continued to stay in touch with Johnson through his social media platforms and an occasional phone conversation. 

Johnson uses representational subject mater (recognizable places, figures, and objects) as an entry point to discuss abstraction. Imagery and color are not allegorical but a dare or challenge to look beyond—can you see something more substantial than the physical? Johnson’s paintings exploit color and shape, confronting the complexity of context to our visual perceptions. 

In our recent conversation, we discussed everything from the democratic nature of viewing art on Instagram to his continued interest in abstraction. While describing his process of constructing a painting and strategically adding colors and shapes, he used the analogy of a fifth person joining a party of four and how it inevitably shifts the dynamic of the environment. The insertion of one new color can alter a mundane composition into something dynamic and engaging. 

His paintings have saturated deep into my understanding of perception. I find myself not only viewing a piece of art with Johnson's formal rhetoric in mind but the whole of my surroundings. On a drive up the coast or through the Central Valley, when my mind inevitably has time to wander, I will flatten the horizon allowing the landscape and the objects which inhabit it to become a dialogue on composition. A crowd of people with varied skin tones and unpredictable colors adorning their bodies provide an opportunity to consider how each color is reacting to what is around it. I have come to understand that formally, a flowering plant excites the eye because of the unified green surrounding the blossoms and that the geometries of the urban landscape are complicated by combining natural and synthetic materials. Each scene inevitably morphing into a Mitchell Johnson painting as I work to discern what caught my eye in the first place. 

Compounded knowledge and experience define our understandings and perceptions of the world. Furthermore, when discussing his work, Johnson, without fail, gives credit to Josef Albers and his lifelong exploration of color, Giorgio Morandi's thoughtful understanding of composition, and Édouard Vuillard's pattern-like flattened scenes. For ultimately, great art shifts the way we see the world.

Mitchell Johnson was born in 1964, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and raised in New York and Virginia. In 1990 he received an MFA from Parson School of Design. After graduating, he took a studio assistant position for artist Sam Francis which brought him to Silicon Valley, where he currently lives and works in Menlo Park, California. His paintings are in over 700 private collections and 25 museum collections (including Bakersfield Museum of Art). 

Rachel Magnus
Curator
Bakersfield Museum of Art