If you ever picked up a brush in your life, you know it can get serious fast.
From the seemingly joyful experience of putting paint onto a canvas with some happy music playing in the background, you suddenly realize that you don’t know anything about how the world feels or looks like. Or at least you don’t know how to translate that experience into paint.
Because if you think the sky is just blue and the grass is just green, you’ve made the mistake of trusting your first glance. And my oh my, it’s a big one. And I’m speaking from my own experience too. Since I started painting around seven years ago, the journey of trying to become a painter has been filled with self-doubt and constant regret for my life’s decisions.
Just joking ;) I think.
Back to the point.
See, our eyes are these amazing things that allow us to view space, light and color. But it’s easy to take it all for granted. We don’t think on a daily basis about how insane it is - to see.
But if you’re an artist, you think about it all the time. It’s like breathing for normal people. You take a walk in the park and right away notice the color of the bench and how the light flickers through the foliage. You walk down the street and see all the movement surrounding you. You start noticing things people usually ignore. And if you know what I’m saying, then you know the amount of work someone has to put into the craft to make art that actually moves people. And when I saw Mitchell Johnson’s work, I immediately knew.
I don’t know about you, but for me the simpler an image can become, without losing its essence, the better it gets. That’s why I’ve always loved Matisse’s work. And Mitchell Johnson does exactly the same - he leaves out the noise and keeps the essence. The light, color and space. And it’s such a joy to look at.
Watching Luxembourg, this is especially easy to notice - flat shapes of color arranged in a perfect hierarchy. The image of the storefront is there but it can also be read as pure abstraction, the way the colors play with each other.
But what I like the most is that the color here doesn’t feel like it’s trying to explain anything. The shadow isn’t there to make the building more believable - it’s just another color sitting next to it. The same goes for the sky, the wall, the ground. Nothing feels fixed. Everything feels composed.
And even though seemingly nothing is happening - it doesn’t matter - because you immediately travel to Jardins de Luxembourg in Paris. It’s a sunny day in the middle of May and you’re just chilling. Everything is great.
And the more you look, the less stable the color becomes. A wall isn’t just one color anymore - it shifts depending on the light, the time of day, the atmosphere. And you can feel that here. Mitchell’s paintings don’t feel like a single moment, but like multiple moments compressed into one image.
It’s difficult to create such a believable atmosphere when painting so simply, and yet one painting after another, Mitchell is achieving this.
Also looking at paintings like these from the perspective of a younger painter who’s as much in love with David Hockney’s art as it gets, you immediately see the link connecting both artists’ interests in painting, which is very similar: to paint the world using color, light and space.
And what’s interesting is that color here doesn’t just describe the scene - it allows it to exist somewhere between abstraction and reality. You can read the painting as a place, but you can also stop reading it completely and just look at it as color. And somehow both feel right at the same time. No grand manifestoes needed to understand such art. The pure vibrancy of color already does the job for me. Add the weightless compositions, and these simple, lazy scenes start to become a real world you can escape into. You get to live the life of someone else living somewhere else, in a different space, under a different rooftop.
And no color here feels isolated. Everything depends on what sits next to it. The blue feels warmer because of the green next to it. A wall starts to glow because of a dull grey beside it. It’s all relational, and that’s what makes it feel alive.
And I think that this way of painting didn’t just appear out of nowhere.
Mitchell Johnson has been doing this for decades. Returning to the same places, the same kinds of scenes, and letting them change over time. You can feel that these paintings come from repetition. From standing in front of the same wall more than once.
You can tell he’s coming from a very specific lineage of painting. There’s that sensitivity to color relationships that feels close to Morandi. The confidence in flat shapes that brings Matisse to mind. Even a bit of that Californian clarity you see in Hockney. But none of it feels borrowed. It feels absorbed. Which is probably the most interesting part.
Because after everything - all the theory and the struggle of trying to understand what a painting even is - it still comes down to one simple thing, especially for a young, often impatient painter like me:
Looking long enough for color to stop being obvious.
And that’s the most exciting part as well. All these years ahead of us, just to learn how to look with more awareness and fewer preconceived ideas of what the world is supposed to look like.
Mitchell Johnson’s Paris exhibition Personal Color (Selected Paintings 1988–2026) is coming to an end, so if you have a chance, I recommend seeing it in person!
Galerie Mercier, Paris
40 Rue de l’Université
Feb 28 - March 21, 2026
P.S. There will be a closing reception at the gallery from 3-4 PM on Saturday, March 21.
Thank you for reading till the end.
Till next time,
Luke
