Exhibition runs through November 9, 2001
Mitchell Johnson, Essence of Place
Latham Square office building
located at 1611 Telegraph Avenue in downtown Oakland
Presented by the Oakland Museum of California Professional Services division

Mitchell Johnson, Near Two Rock (Dave's Yellow Plane), 1998 - 2000

Each year, Mitchell Johnson travels extensively, using the motifs found in landscape and figure painting to explore the formal properties of painting – color, surface, form, scale and light. He seeks to preserve the essence of place, recreating on canvas the complexities in the space around him and the changes in his reaction to it.

Painting on location demands an artist direct all senses to absorbing the ephemeral information on view, to capture on canvas the sensory experience. What is most remarkable about Johnson is his patience to allow the scene to reveal itself to him, all the while wrestling with the reality of recording the transitory aspects of nature: a shadow cast from a passing cloud, the gentle movements of sinuous vines, or a wave dancing in the surf.

This resolve is driven by an unyielding desire to discover where a painting begins and where it ends. Johnson initiates the creative process, assuming a level of responsibility even before applying paint to canvas. Yet with his first assured brushstroke he begins a new canvas, trusting that during the creative process he will resolve the formal elements while allowing room for the audience to experience the vision, intuitively and intimately, as he experienced the place.

In the end, we are left with compelling evocations of time and place that hold enduring grace and clarity. In Johnson’s work, we witness the extraordinary gift of making the canvas a window, of creating something on the other side that exists as life itself.

The exhibition was curated by Elizabeth C. McLaughlin and runs through October 26, 2001 at the Latham Square office building located at 1611 Telegraph Avenue in downtown Oakland. Building hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Sponsored by Latham Square Associates, LLC and CAC Real Estate Management Company, Inc. in association with the Oakland Museum of California Professional Services division.