Purple, green, pink and turquoise are colors you think you may see on the sharp gem facet edges of North Truro’s colonial houses, because when Mitchell Johnson paints them, they seem logical, not fanciful, but real. Indeed, color and shape seem to be the point rather than the subjects themselves. The houses and landscapes Johnson paints are, in a way, excuses to express colors. One wonders, is he suggesting our world is just color and form? And yet those colors and forms evoke the essence of place: his European vistas are somehow, well, so European. His vistas of New York, are utterly New York; those of San Francisco as from Russian Hill, could only be San Francisco. So, too, his Cape Cod vistas essentialize the Cape. You can inhale the sea and the musty scent of a pearly gray-blue sky. You can see Johnson’s homage to the Cape’s town of Truro at his exhibit, “Sixteen Years in … [Read more...] about SEASONAL WARMTH AT CASTLE HILL: JOHNSON CAPTURES TRURO’S SPECIAL TEXTURES AND COLORS
