Instructor: Mitchell Johnson
Monday - Friday
September 8 - 12
9am - 12pm
Open Studio: Mon - Thurs, 12 - 4pm

Mitchell Johnson’s color- and shape-driven paintings exist at the intersection of color theory, art history, nostalgia, and observed experience.

In this color workshop we will use oil paints and unusual colorful still life setups to explore the teachings of Josef Albers and the impact of scale and context on color perception. The class should benefit students of any level who want to improve their objective knowledge of color mixing and color theory as a means of using subtle and complex color relationships in their own creative work.

Mitchell Johnson of Menlo Park, California, a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, is the subject of the monograph, Color as Content. His color and shape driven paintings appear regularly in The New York Times Magazine, WSJ Magazine, and The New Yorker. Johnson divides his time between his favorite locations in Europe, Cape Cod and New England. His work is in the permanent collections of over 35 museums and over 500 private collections. Mitchell Johnson’s work has been exhibited alongside that of Milton Avery, Georgia O’Keeffe, Wolf Kahn, and Richard Diebenkorn. The most recent museum acquisitions were by Museo Morandi in Bologna, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, Tucson Museum of Art and the Crocker Art Museum. Johnson received his MFA at Parsons in New York in 1990 where he studied with many former students of Hans Hofmann. Johnson taught briefly at the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto, CA and recently resumed teaching color workshops in 2019.

The legendary art critic, Donald Kuspit, wrote about Johnson’s work in Whitehot Magazine: “Johnson is a master of abstraction, as his oddly constructivist paintings show, but of unconscious feeling, for his geometry serves to contain and with that control the strong feelings implicit in his strong colors. Apart from that, his paintings are art historically important, because they seamlessly fuse abstraction and realism, which Kandinsky tore apart to the detriment of both even as he recognized that they were implicitly inseparable, tied together in a Gordian knot, as they masterfully are in Johnson’s paintings.”