By Chris Ashley
Accompanied the exhibition of the same title. Some Walls, Oakland, CA, June 2010.

Well-known for his paintings, most recently widely-exhibited works with precisely-placed bars of evocative color that float on casual-appearing yet skillfully-intercepted washy black-stained canvas grounds, Douglas Witmer’s Fruitville series might initially appear to be quite a different direction for the artist. The appearance of three dimensional art objects, small and intimate at no more than eight inches in any direction, might seem sudden, but actually Witmer has slowly worked on this series with great consideration for over ten years. These pieces have never been shown with his paintings, and in fact they have never before been publicly shown at all except on the artist’s web site. The Fruitville series are interestingly connected to Witmer’s paintings, and spark additional dialog about his overall ongoing project. More…

Photo by Chris Ashley

by P. Timothy Gierschick II
Published at Gierschickwork, March 2010.

A pair of paintings in Ring the Bells Anew arrested my attention quickly upon turning the corner: A Trace of Something I Want to Feel Again and We’ll get Away with It. It was an impulse for which I couldn’t find a reason (not that it was completely necessary to)…until I spoke briefly with Douglas Witmer about them, and found out that they had two related common denominators. They were the same size canvas, and that particular ratio was a new one for Witmer. That said, they fit nicely into my resonation with the show’s title: Witmer is ringing a very old bell, but the tintinnabulum never grows old: in fact, the results feel as fresh as does every toll from a bell tower greeting a new day. The possibilities continue. More…

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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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. Read the rest of this entry »