John Joseph Mitchell: 41 Painting of Summer and Fall

Philip Martin Gallery is pleased to present, "41 Paintings of Summer and Fall," a solo exhibition of new oil-on-panel paintings by New Jersey-based artist John Joseph Mitchell.

John Joseph Mitchell's paintings come from looking - be it on a bike ride, a walk, time on his porch. "If something catches my eye I look at it longer. I look for ways to see. I begin paintings that way. Maybe there’s a good shape, pattern, color or I just like the scene. I take photos, make notes, sketch, and make monotypes. Eventually some combination of those things gives way to a painting.”

John Joseph Mitchell lives and works a few miles up the road from the house in which he grew up. It is a fairly rural area on the New Jersey Cape in between the Pine Barrens and the Atlantic Ocean. The alternating patches of woods, marshes, and farms, the back bays of the barrier islands, the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay are where his works come into being. After ten years in Philadelphia, Mitchell moved home, seeking in part the people and places that, as he describes it, "make up the visions of my mind’s eye.”

"The series aspect of these works solidifies their physical scale and intimacy," Mitchell comments. His show title, "41 Paintings of Summer and Fall," points to the primacy of observation. At the same time, it refers to Hokusai's famous work, "36 Views of Mount Fuji" (1830-32), a group of woodblock prints that place the viewer outside in different seasons and under a range of weather conditions.
Mitchell, who recently helped establish one of America's first environmentally friendly screen-printing studios, is well versed in printmaking. The application of color in that medium is very specific, with careful attention to edge, shape and line quality. This interest flows into Mitchell's paintings, of which he notes, "I think color is the most important thing and maybe the most personal. I like it when a color exists in two points in space at once or when an edge is lost to two colors of similar value and temperature.”

Mitchell adds, "I also spend a lot of time looking at books of the artists I love. I like holding them and turning them and flipping the pages back and forth between pictures. It is the primary way I look at paintings. I think that has a lot to do with my paintings being small and on wood. I kind of hold them like the books I look at. I might get excited by a composition, formal device, color, or color palette. I will try to find it in my world or see my world through the lens of that painting. I remember reading one of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother and he said he was trying to see the south of France the way that the great Japanese printmakers saw Japan. I like that.”