Interview with Brent Hallard, at Visual Discrepancies. Published December 2008.
I want the present moment of seeing it to be charged with the possibility of some kind of change in the next present moment of seeing it. I hope for that to activate the sense that you feel yourself seeing. I like to think of those moments as clear, pure, innocent, and solitary. And if you can get to them, then you have, in a way, started an experiential engine for yourself, and your thoughts can begin to move in uniquely personal directions.
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by Vittorio Colaizzi
Exhibition review published in Brick Weekly, Richmond VA, Wednesday, January 10, 2007.
Installation view of “Contemplations,” Red Door Gallery, Richmond VA, December 2006. Pictured L-R: Mockingbird, Looker, Untitled, Monk, and Dove.
Decoration haunts abstraction, pacifying its disruptive potential so that it may be assimilated into “the arts.” The best paintings are embodied visual thinking, and we think them every bit as much as we see them. Decoration, on the other hand, is not thought but recitation, the expert assemblage of various tropes for a handsome effect. This dialectic has nothing to do with style or technique, and cannot be simplified as “rough” vs. “slick.” Nor is this distinction intended to denigrate all pattern-based abstraction, which can sometimes be a corrective to stagnant conventions. Decoration occurs when a viewer is told what he or she wants to hear, and abstraction occurs when comfort is refused. The distinction is rarely clear, and viewers will always disagree on what constitutes mere repetition and what constitutes adventurous dwelling in the unfamiliar. Douglas Witmer incorporates the very opposition of decoration vs. thought, or recitation vs. discovery, into his paintings, and makes it a part of our experience.
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An in-depth interview originally published online by Minus Space, December 2005.
Douglas Witmer makes paintings with a purpose. I mean this in two ways–he makes paintings purposefully, and his paintings have a purpose. This is not to say in the least that his paintings are predetermined and strictly didactic. Despite their apparently structured appearance they are expressive rather than merely planned and executed, and porous rather than closed in meaning.
Witmer’s varied and improvised use of color, surface, form, and material is surprisingly expressive. Anyone who spends time with Mondrian’s signature paintings, for example, knows that they are not rigid repetitions. Similarly, the viewer will find that Witmer’s paintings are individually achieved, and this is part of where his purposefulness lies: geometry is not something always precisely measured; it can be nuanced and emotional, and it often breaks rules or has unlikely sources. My mention of Mondrian of course risks a misunderstanding via an assumed derivation or inheritance, so perhaps a more appropriate and useful reference might be Klee’s sensitive, playful, and inventive qualities.
As for the purpose of Witmer’s paintings, this is always the tricky part–society generally wants to know what a piece of art is about, what it means, and what it is good for. More… »