By Jonathan F. Walz
Essay published in conjunction with Douglas Witmer : Recent Paintings, Peng Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. April 2002.
In the history of American painting, Philadelphia is a city known for cultivating a long and rich artistic tradition of realism. The source of this tradition is often traced back to the founding of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, America’s first art school and museum, where many prominent proponents of realism studied, taught, or exhibited. Surrounded by these historical examples and influences, Douglas Witmer has been forging his own definition of realism, rejecting some doctrines and pushing others to their logical conclusions. With modest yet surprisingly rich canvases, Witmer demonstrates his research into the nature of painted reality.
Belying the seeming simplicity of the term, “realism” as a style is like much of reality—a slippery fish, a complex range of gray areas, rather than a mere binary opposition of this versus that. Traditionally, the term has meant an image painted illusionistically so as to reproduce nature faithfully. Since the advent of modernism, “realism” has become more ambivalent and can mean recognizable subject matter on the one hand (albeit perhaps a bit more “painterly”), or the abstract visual expression of an inner, spiritual truth on the other.
With his current work, Witmer plumbs the profound depths of the idea of “reality” and in the process maps out a further stylistic permutation. Here the “object-ness” of the paintings—their overwhelming size, their insistent intrusion into our space—is held in tension with their “retinality” achieved by bold color and design, delicately handled surfaces, and the vestiges of illusionistic imagery.
In Philadelphia in 2002, we find ourselves physically present in the midst of this stylistic continuum. At one end is Charles Wilson Peale’s Staircase Group, hanging nearby in the American Wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This work, with its intention to trick the eye, emphasizes painted surface illusion; a very real wooden step at the bottom of the work, however, aims to trip up the viewer in a literal way. Witmer’s works cluster at the other end of the conceptual spectrum of realism. Here the elements of Peale’s paradigm are transposed by Witmer’s emphatic paintings-as-objects with representational stair steps depicted on their surfaces.
These stair step images are among the “failed” perspectival spaces of various receding planes that Witmer has culled from his study of early Renaissance devotional painting and uses as a metaphor for his own artistic and spiritual crises of belief. Given the human condition and our continual search for significance, it is in the active engagement, in the intentional relationship—Witmer’s engagement with his materials, our relationship with his finished paintings—where meaning may be discovered. Once he has gained our attention through the powerful physical presence of his canvases, Witmer invites us to join him in a leap of faith, to step up and out to a place we’ve never been.
Jonathan F. Walz is a writer and holds a Ph.D in Art History from the University of Maryland.