INSTALMENTS | John Joseph Mitchell

Somewhere very close to the Tuckahoe River, there is a 200-year-old grey wooden house, which is the workplace and home of John Joseph Mitchell (b.1989, Somers Point, NJ). In the bright front parlour, little paintings on panel are dotted all over the wall, they are hung in groups of two or three. Between them they tell a visual tale of the New Jersey landscape, the people who live there, and moments of quiet contemplation in Upper Township.

It is a place of farming and fertile soils, a place where time passes slowly, but not so slowly that the shifts in nature go unobserved by the artist, from the first Spring bud to the last leaf in Winter. In his vignettes, a combination of paintings and monotypes, Mitchell captures the things that can be so often taken for granted. A bird migrates across water, a lamp is switched on, a tree shudders in the wind, a chair rocks in the sitting room. The outcome is a series of paintings that act as windows to the artist’s world. As Mitchell puts it:

 “I like little stories, glimpses, moments details… in my painting I am trying to encapsulate the most micro, finite moment possible. For me this is just as deep as the macro, the infinite, the humongous.”

 His wooden panels are painstakingly hand-made, each panel sanded, stained and primed, and set within a hand-painted frame – the process of preparation, almost as ritual in itself, is carried out by the artist in his workshop above the studio. Small works in pastel and crayon on card boxes, and monotypes on paper, always made in series, always subtly different from each other, emerge in the same way carefully and quietly over time. As the artist says: ‘I set very specific boundaries and tools to work with. I work on several things at once, the paintings can take anything from a week to a year to make… I enjoy the idea of taking the three-dimensional information of the world and turning it into a facsimile – an analogy –simplifying the things that you see so that they can be more easily understood.’