Mitchell Johnson "Twenty Years in Truro"
Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Massachusetts hosts the Mitchell Johnson exhibit, "Twenty Years in Truro (Selected Paintings 1989-2025)"
PRESS RELEASE
Mitchell Johnson: “Twenty Years in Truro (Selected Paintings and Sculptures 1989-2025)”
Truro Center For the Arts at Castle Hill presents a solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures by California artist, Mitchell Johnson, September 3-14, 2025. This is Johnson’s fifth exhibition at Castle Hill where he teaches a master color class every September.
There have been two watershed moments in Mitchell Johnson’s 45 year painting career: the first, his work trips to France, 1989-1991, the second, his first painting trip to Cape Cod in 2005 when he stayed in North Truro. Castle Hill is pleased to present a survey exhibit of Johnson’s work examining the impact of North Truro motifs on all of his paintings from various locations in the USA, Europe and Newfoundland. The exhibition will also include sculptures made of painted wood which reference both Cape architecture and the sculptures of Kurt Schwitters. The paintings, primarily landscapes, are an eclectic group of compositions spanning Johnson’s twenty years of annual painting trips to Cape Cod which started in May, 2005 immediately after Johnson saw the historic Giorgio Morandi/Josef Albers exhibit at for Museo Morandi in Bologna, Italy. (Versions of the Morandi/Albers exhibit have also been curated by Nicholas Fox Weber and Heinz Liesbrock in other venues after 2005.) Early NYC and French paintings from 1989 will be included at Castle Hill to provide further context for the impact of Johnson’s first stay in North Truro
Artist reception, Thursday, September 4 from 4-6pm.
Artist talk: Friday, September 5 from 3:00-3:30.
The legendary art critic, Donald Kuspit, reviewed Johnson’s paintings three times, most recently in a 2025 Whitehot Magazine article:
“they are astonishing masterpieces of phenomenological perception, fraught with what the philosopher George Santayana calls “hushed reverberations.””
The late Chris Busa wrote in Provincetown Arts in 2012:
“If many of Johnson's paintings are titled after the places that inspired them, no such places actually exist. Each one is a collage of compressed intimacies spread out over the months it takes to paint them. He has done what Edwin Dickinson called Premier Coup, in which a painting is completed outdoors in one blow. Yet his typical practice is to hold a painting for several months, or more, in the studio, to see if a painting stands the test of repeated looking, often involving the process of memory revision, where a succession of impressions gained over weeks or months is expressed as continuous flow.”
Johnson received his MFA from Parsons School of Design in 1990 where he studied with many former students of Hans Hofmann: Paul Resika, Leland Bell, Robert De Niro, Sr., Jane Freilicher, Nell Blaine and Larry Rivers. His paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums.
Johnson’s paintings have appeared in numerous feature films including The Holiday (2006), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) and It’s Complicated (2011). He has appeared on TV programs in France (BFM Nice), Italy (Generation Bellezza), and Monaco (Monaco InfoTV). Johnson has been a visiting artist at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, The American Academy in Rome, Borgo Finocchieto and the Lewitt House in Praiano, Italy.
He has had two museum retrospectives, in 2014 at Bakersfield Museum of Art, and in 2024 at Musee Villa Les Camelias in Cap D’Ail, France.
