INSTALMENTS is a series of focussed presentations that take place in the ‘Feast Room’, on the first floor of the Glasite Meeting House, the building which houses our gallery in Edinburgh. The ninth artist in this series is 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.’
“‘Turning on the lamp’ is my favourite work in this series – I love the repetition of material and colour throughout the painting. The fold of the woman’s skirt imitates the fabric in the curtains, there is symmetry. The lamp in this painting belonged to my grandmother on my mother’s side - I knew that I wanted that lamp since I was ten.” - John Joseph Mitchell
“This painting depicts a moment when I was riding my bike at around 3 or 4pm in the afternoon. It was very overcast; the leaves were still brown and orange and gathered on the forest floor, but the maple trees around were silver. They are always silver, they are called silver maples, but on this day, they were SHINING silver. It was bewildering – I wondered how this could have happened, how could I figure this out and convey it in painting? The blue lines in the painting are the tubing that gets inserted into the tree, to pull the maple syrup out.” - JJM
“Whenever I am finished with a box of pastels or crayons, I will make these little works, but I never seek them out. The boxes must come into my life and then I will use them – that’s how the works come into existence. They are more spontaneous, more serendipitous. They were born from using found material, chance allowed me to make them, and so that’s how I’d like them to continue.” - JJM
“I love this rocking chair; I paint it constantly. It’s a Shaker rocking chair – a beautiful piece of furniture that a friend of mine got for me. His father is a renowned conservator in the region. I am a person who likes old things, they make me feel curious… I like to imagine an object’s past, its history, and its passage to where it is now.” - JJM
“I often think about my grandmother in relation to these boxes. She had a shadow box - which is like a frame with a black mirrored recessed shelf, a back panel and side panels which can be decorated. You put seasonal trinkets in there. A lot of what I make now comes from looking at the shadow box as a child. She would put figurines in there at Christmas and Halloween, these strange little antiquities became like miniature worlds for me. I was obsessed with this collection of things gathered by my grandmother.” - JJM
