John Mitchell’s recent paintings are poetic studies of familiarity. Sublimely beautiful and intimate in scale, Mitchell consciously chooses a reduced palette producing captured moments adrift in atmospheric splendor. Each painting speaks of a memory; that moment when one returns to a familiar place again and again. Each visit reveals a unique nuance, a visual marker revealing something new, abiding the natural urge to revisit... to go home again. Mitchell’s fresh approach to traditional landscape and still-life painting evokes a sense of calm and allows the viewer a welcome moment of self-reflection.

“My paintings are generally born out of observation of things and places I see and come to know through extended periods of looking” says Mitchell. “The things are generally flowers and simple items, and the places are the places I roam and love in and around Southern New Jersey. These places and things allow me to see new shapes, colors, and patterns that I try to arrange into interesting pictures. Once the thing or place is looked at long enough, and the colors and shapes that make it up are remembered and known, I can then move onto dealing with them as simply formal elements of a design to be moved or altered to best serve each other within the bounds of the painting. My only concern is that in the end the painting can be interesting enough to be looked at for as long as I originally looked at the things or places from which the painting derives.”

Mitchell graduated from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with an MFA in painting, and lives in Philadelphia.