around the circle
Seipp Gallery Welcomes Mitchell Johnson
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The Anita Seipp Gallery hosted a small retrospective of the work of Menlo Park artist Mitchell Johnson during the month of February. Johnson has lived in the Palo Alto area for over 20 years and this was the second exhibit of his work at Castilleja. His color and shape-driven paintings have changed over time as evidenced by the wide gamut of approach to color and composition in this show. The Italian artist Giorgio Morandi and Yale professor and artist Josef Albers have influenced his work. Mitchell taught a condensed version of Albers’ famous color course to Deborah Trilling’s Drawing and Painting II class allowing the students to better understand the importance of context for color perception— the underlying theme of all of Johnson’s paintings. The workshop covered how we see color and how to think about how context influences what we see. He revealed that “warm” and “cool” and “dark” and “light” can only be understood in relation to scale and surrounding colors. The students then made their own collages illustrating the contextual color analysis made clear in Mitchell’s workshop.
1 Lucignano D’Asso by Mitchell Johnson 2 Asclano by Mitchell Johnson 3 untitled by Nicole Mitchell ’15
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4 untitled by Hannah Knowles ’15 5 untitled by Brooke Anderson ’15
spring/summer 2013 | 29