North Truro n. 6, 2005

North Truro painting that was influenced by Morandi and Albers and appeared in the film, The Holiday (2006)

The painting below, Truro n. 6, 2005 was made during my first painting trip to Cape Cod in May, 2005, just two months after I had seen a Josef Albers/Giorgio Morandi exhibit in Bologna, Italy at Museo Morandi. A reproduction of the painting appears in the beginning of the film, The Holiday (2006).

“North Truro, N. 6,” 2005, 16x20 inches, oil/canvas.

Edward Burns walking past “North Truro n. 6” in the The Holiday by Nancy Meyers.

There was something about seeing Morandi and Albers hanging next to each other that changed the way I looked at both of their paintings, but also impacted the way I was approaching composition in my own paintings. I was already beginning to select views that had bigger shapes and were closer to me than the deep spaces I had been painting in Italy and California for 15 years. Morandi and Albers pushed me further into a new direction and that direction is very connected to the paintings I make in North Truro every year going back to the first trip in 2005.

Mitchell Johnson painting at Sutton Place in May, 2005. It doesn’t look like this anymore.

Here is a sequence of Morandi and Albers work to give you a sense of what I saw in 2005.

Giorgio Morandi, Cortile di via Fondazza, 1956.

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, 1976. One of his last paintings.

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1963.

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, 1966.

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1955.

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, 1976.

There’s a section in my 2014 monograph, Color as Content, which recreated this pairing of Albers and Morandi. This 288 page book is now a collector’s item. It accompanied my retrospective at the Bakersfield Museum of Art and an exhibit of my paintings at Villa Taverna in Rome.

Here’s a painting from Asciano, Italy near Siena, that also speaks to the meaning of the 2005 Morandi/Albers encounter.

Mitchell Johnson, Asciano, 2009, 10x14 inches, oil/canvas.

I’ll be at 425 Market Street in San Francisco this Friday morning, April 11. Please email if you want to meet at the exhibit.

NEWS

“Giant Paintings from New England, California and Newfoundland” will be on view at 425 Market Street in San Francisco, March 17-May, 30, 2025.

Upcoming exhibition “Small Paintings” at Galerie Mercier, Paris, May 20-24, 2025.

Group show at The Glass House Fundraiser in New Canaan in June.

Group show at Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, MA in July.

September solo exhibition at Truro Center for the Arts, Truro, MA.

Click here to see all of the new notecards including Paris, San Francisco, Amalfi, Newfoundland, Race Point, North Truro, Maine.

Notecards are also available in person at Explore Booksellers in Aspen, Keplers Books in Menlo Park, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, SFMOMA, University Art In Redwood City, Book Passage in San Francisco and Corte Madera and The Cape Cod Museum of Art.