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Email PageJon Redmond and Mitchell Johnson 2006
September 7, 2006- September 20, 2006
Jon Redmond, Mitchell Johnson
J. Cacciola
531 W 25th St Jon Redmond Strange Turn |  Jon Redmond Hotel View |  Jon Redmond Warm, Cool |
 Mitchell Johnson Across Lucignano |  Mitchell Johnson St. Emilion - Yellow |  Mitchell Johnson Truro Cottages |
Redmond’s subject matter are landscapes and buildings, interiors and exteriors, void of inhabitants and imbued with an eerie sense of impending drama. Under roiling clouds or down a narrow hallway, the viewer is subjected to the intensity of the mundane.
Primarily a plein aire painter Redmond tends to work in sizes that are easily transported on bicycle. The modest sizes, many 10 inches by 10 inches imbue the work with an approachable, human quality. These are paintings that, at once, welcome a long, lingering gaze while conveying a palpable sense of the immediacy of the artist’s experience. They are clearly places captured as the artist encountered them but, when filtered through the artist’s eye and sensibility, become much more than mere representations of place. Streets, homes, the land, the places where children play and invent their own worlds, are the stuff from which Redmond constructs his own world of imagery. Redmond’s paintings appropriate and transform the everyday, capturing a sense of home in these structures and the fragility of the very notion of home.
Jon Redmond graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1991, and was honored with many awards, including the Thomas Eakins Memorial Prize in 1988 and 1990, the Mary Butler Memorial Award, the Wallace Cadwalader Prize for Landscape and Portraiture, the Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship, and a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center in 1992 and 1993. Redmond's paintings are in many important collections including the Delaware Art Museum.
California artist, Mitchell Johnson is known for dynamic landscape paintings that are a visual chronicle of his travels. In the current show Johnson has produced a compelling body of color and pattern driven new landscapes based upon his recent travels in Italy, Denmark, France and Cape Cod.
There is a playfulness in Johnson’s work that lends to the vitality of his sun drenched scenes. What appears casual in Johnson’s work is the result of rigorous studio practice in addition to his pleine aire work. Always perched on the edge of abstraction, Johnson does not abandon the abstract for the representational so much as construct a context for it. In his work color becomes form, line becomes definition, paint becomes space.
Johnson comments about his work, "My interests are in color, context and perception. When I lived in Europe and even now when I go back, there is a sense of being adrift. The motifs or situations that become my paintings are an instinctive response to this lightness of being. It’s not a symbolic response to the landscape, but a physical response fed by the notion that certain shapes and colors can be grounding or serve to counteract the randomness of experience."
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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