John Joseph Mitchell: A Cat in the Other Room

Philip Martin Gallery is pleased to present, "A Cat in the Other Room," an online exhibition of intimate landscape paintings, still lifes and domestic interiors by New Jersey-based artist John Joseph Mitchell.

John Joseph Mitchell's paintings consider subject matter and interiority. Specifically, the sense that one's vision is figured by what we see, how we see, and how we think about the process of our own observation. "I like looking at things," John Joseph Mitchell comments. "Things in nature, homes, patterns, people, and of course paintings, drawings, prints, and pictures. The painters I like all seem deeply connected to their particular world and looking at it. That’s what I try to do. I look at the marshes, farms, woods, and the ocean and the houses, people, animals and things in them that surround me. Then drawings, field notes, monotypes and color studies aid my memory and eye in making paintings that are in equal measure an object and a picture. I hope express and elicit the emotional range of visual experience."

"A Cat in the Other Room,” the painting after which John Joseph Mitchell's show is titled, features a cat on a green field. This green field forms the foreground and background of the painting. At the same time, this green field delineates the space in which the cat stands and twists. It is as if the cat is both in the room with us, and also in the room adjacent. Another work, "A Fisherman in the Rain," depicts a man in a boat on a yellow lake among the marshes. The movement in this painting would seem to come not from the actions of its protagonist, but rather from the soft linear marks in the gray field that form the back of the picture plane. 

John Joseph Mitchell's paintings provide quiet contemplation. We sense the stillness of space as it surrounds familiar objects. "Early Summer Bouquet" is as much about the blue wall that holds down the upper half of the painting as it is about the vase of flowers the sit in the foreground, the red, yellow and white flowers of which arc across the picture plane. Mitchell’s works are aware of photography and linear perspective, but they don’t really build their world that way. Instead, John Joseph Mitchell finds the feeling - emotional, intellectual, physical - that exists between things, orienting us as viewers in the midst of these relations.



"John Joseph Mitchell: A Cat in the Other Room" is online May 9 - 23, 2023.