Water Tower Paintings
Mitchell Johnson Water Tower Paintings 2011-2024
I finished the Chinatown painting above in my Menlo Park studio yesterday. Sometimes I work on paintings for months or years. This doesn’t mean that I look at the painting every day, just that I don’t necessarily resolve it quickly. I work on a lot of paintings at once and they help each other go to an interesting, unexpected place. I started the water tower painting above when I was staying in a hotel in NYC in 2018. I booked the hotel room because it has a view I like and a balcony where I can store my wet paintings. Here’s a photo inside the room when it was too windy to paint outside and a second photo where I’m painting at the ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. (I later realized Edward Hopper made several paintings there.)
My interest in these water towers comes and goes. When I lived in New York as a teenager and in graduate school in 1988-1990 I don’t remember ever being intrigued by the ubiquitous water towers. Around 2011-2013 I started taking a trip to Manhattan each spring with my son. We usually stayed at the New Yorker Hotel, again because of the views, and I had meetings in the New York Times building which also has incredible views. I think it was 2011 that we visited a photo studio in Tribeca and I looked at the water towers outside of the window and it clicked. Maybe when I was a grad student at Parsons I just didn’t see enough elevated views of Manhattan. (Water towers are used to create water pressure for taller buildings.)
The painting above is a mash-up of the view from the New Yorker hotel with some architecture I saw from the New York Times building.
Here’s a photo of me drawing at the New York Times building in 2018. I was able to draw directly on canvases in a quiet part of the building that looks southwest with Hudson Yards on my right. The Port Authority is just below to my right. I have a crystal clear memory of my parents putting me on a bus in the Port Authority in the summer of 1975 to visit a friend in Virginia.
Outside of the windows of the New York Times building there’s a water tower I’ve been looking at for quite a while and on one visit I was surprised to see that it had been painted green. It’s the only one in NYC I’ve ever seen painted. I started a painting of the Jenga building in 2018 and then after seeing the green water tower I added it to the painting above, which again, is a collage or mash-up of several places, several different times.
Today only, November 19, if you’re in the USA and visit the NY Times Arts page, you’ll see a few other water tower paintings.