30 Years of Art in 30 days...revisiting 1996-97

Just after getting married in the summer of 1995, Rebecca and I moved to Philadelphia. Our first apartment was odd/interesting and cheap. One of the reasons we chose it was for its very small second bedroom which was to be my studio. I found work as an art handler at The Philadelphia Museum of Art and at The Barnes Foundation. At the Barnes in particular, it was pretty incredible to hold a small Cezanne in my hands in the afternoon, then go home and paint later that evening!

At this point I was making work on an easel I bought for myself during my college days, ordered from the Utrecht art supplies catalog. Generally, if I wanted/needed something, I bought the cheapest thing. I remember I didn’t do that for the easel. I splurged to get something a few pegs up the product line. I was pretty proud of that easel. Something about it made painting seem like an “event.” And that’s the way painting continues to feel for me.

Continuing to work with oil paint and thick impasto, I began to approach color more tonally. I’m sure this was because of the influence of Warren Rohrer. I began to think more about “color field” although the work was still small. Warren is my painting hero and I’ve written extensively about him. I was anticipating spending time with him in Philadelphia, however he died a few months before we moved to the city.

Douglas Witmer, New Paintings, The Arts League, Philadelphia, May 1997

Within a few months of settling in Philadelphia, I enrolled in a darkroom photography class at the Arts League right around the corner from our apartment. They had a nice gallery space. I applied for and was given a solo show. In May of 1997, I debuted about a dozen or so new paintings and some works on paper. The image on the exhibition announcement was a painting I titled “After August,” which was a painted response to my dislike of all the Rodins I had to work with at the Barnes. I had a large arrangement of lilacs in the gallery. It was so fragrant.

The two paintings above were both in that exhibition. “Squall” is a painting I’ve kept for myself. “Handlebar” was bought by a friend who still lives in our neighborhood and I get to see it now and again (and borrow it back to photograph).

30 years of art in 30 days...revisiting 1994

Welcome to this collection of images and stories to celebrate my 30th year as an exhibiting artist. I plan to use each of the 30 days of April to share at least one work, perhaps an installation view, and some memories.

I graduated from college in the spring of 1993, but still had to complete a study term abroad to receive my diploma. I spent the summer of 1993 in the eastern German town of Jena. I was drawing all. the. time. that summer. And I made a lot of watercolors.

In the early 1990s I would go to the college library and pore over the art magazines I couldn’t afford to subscribe to. Back then it it seemed like there was no way to open an art magazine and NOT see an ad or a review for a Sean Scully exhibition. I photocopied so many articles. I also kept an Xacto knife with me. Knowing that other students would read the articles, I never cut an image from an article. But if there was an ad with image I liked (needed!) and it didn’t have the text of an article on the opposite side, it was fair game for my collection, which I kept organized in a large manilla expanding file folder. I still have it.

The first sentence of a November 1985 “ArtNerws” article about Scully began with a quote: “My stripes push out in to the world, trying to be more than paintings. The energy flies off into something unkown.” This just captured everything I wanted for my own work.

But in the fall of 1994, I was back in Pennsylvania living in my parents’ home. I had an “art gallery” job…selling a lot of dreadful and a handful of tasteful prints to tourists in Lancaster County’s Amish country. It paid so poorly I couldn’t afford an apartment. After about 6 months living at home I finally found myself a comically tiny studio in an artist warehouse building in downtown Lancaster which I also couldn’t really afford.

Those were the days when you could go to a new store called “Borders Books” and look at anything you wanted for as long as you wanted. Almost like the library…but I didn’t dare cut up the stuff there! However at Borders I discovered the fairly new publication “Modern Painters.”, which was my introduction to the work of Howard Hodgkin. His approach to color was something unlike anything I’d seen and I was completely gobsmacked.

Lancaster had a small but active bohemian scene, with some good late night poetry at coffeehouses, an independent theatre company, a good indie music club, a few bookshops, one contemporary art gallery, and a cool art supply shop that had a gallery above. Another local bookshop called Artemis Books also had a kind of gallery program. In the winter of 1994 they offered to show my work later that summer.

And so it began…my first studio and an exhibition to work for! Drunk on the expressive structuralism of Scully and the jubilant color of Hodgkin, I made 7-8 modestly sized paintings and a suite of what I called “color notes” which were actually tiny color fields. A local band called “Inca Campers” played at the reception. I thought they were the coolest! (Turns out they’re still around!) I only remember selling one of the color notes, and giving another painting to some friends for a wedding present. The whereabouts of the above painting “Slab” is unknown, but it was a treat to find it among my slides and think back to that season when I made it…so innocent and full of possibility. (sorry about the quality of the image…never knew I’d one day want to “scan” a slide with a “phone” haha!)

Story Time -- about the work of Jesse Hickman

Jesse Hickman, Defiance 2 (for Douglas), 2016. House paint on wood, 6.5 x 11 x 1 inches.

I’ve been photographing and cataloging my art collection. I find myself wanting to make an occasional series of posts about the artworks I live with and about my cherished friendships with artists around the world.

I’ll start with this piece by Jesse Hickman. He made it in 2016, but the story of it really begins 30 years ago.

The piece is called “Defiance 2 (for Douglas),” house paint on wood, 6.5 x 11 x 1 inches.

I went to a small college in northern Indiana. The closest city, Chicago, was several hours away. The art department made field trips there once or twice a year. On one such trip in the spring of 1990, I saw Jesse Hickman’s exhibition “The County Series” at Klein Art Works, a group of strong, shaped, rectilinear compositions. The dark bands were burned into the surface. On first take, they were black and white...but really they were various organically produced shades blackish-brown, yellowish-white, etc. The titles were names of midwestern US counties.

The card for Jesse’s show went directly on the wall of my room for the next several years. I loved the image on it, a work titled “Defiance.” (Pics 2,3) That show influenced an entire body of my drawings over that time. And it was a strong push for me in the direction of geometric abstraction generally.

I never heard of him again, but I never forgot his name. However in 2014, I noticed his name on an announcement for a small gallery in northern Michigan where I vacation each summer. I inquired a little bit. Sure enough, it was the same Jesse Hickman, now living in northern Michigan. We corresponded for the first time and I told him the story of seeing his show. We arranged to meet that summer when I came to Michigan and our friendship began.

Later, I found a drawing from the summer of 1991 (4). It shows the influence his work had on mine. It’s an abstract interpretation of the view out the window of my bedroom...his exhibition card hung on the wall above my bed that entire summer. I decided to send him the drawing. In return, Jesse made me a miniature “Defiance.”

Story Time -- The Klösterkirche Thalbürgel

Recently I was able to revisit a very important place in my life as an artist. The Klösterkirche Thalbürgel was built in the Romanesque style beginning in 1133 as the cloister for a Benedictine monastery, and a community of monks lived and worshipped there until the reformation. Today the church serves as a place of worship for both the Protestant and Catholic diocese, as well as hosting concerts and exhibitions.

I think of May 1993 as when I “really” became an artist. I finished undergrad with a 3-month study abroad term and lived with a family in the eastern German city of Jena. Up to that point in my life, when I referred to myself as an artist, I was accustomed to people (Americans) asking “but what do you do?” The “but” at the beginning of the phrase made it clear the question was not about what I did as an artist. In Germany I got the same question, however with no qualifying “but...” They wanted to know about my art. There was often a follow-up question. This kind of instant acknowledgement and engagement gave me so much confidence. I was able to shed somewhat my own internalized devaluation of what would be my life’s work, instilled in me from the culture of my upbringing.

During those months I interned with a ceramist in the nearby town of Bürgel, a center of a particular regional style of polka-dot decorated pottery called “Blauweiss.” Down a hill on the outskirts of the town was a smaller village with the medieval cloisters. The Klosterkirche was still mainly intact and in use but the rest of the site was a preserved ruin. Several days a week after work I’d walk to the cloisters for a few minutes before catching the bus back to Jena. The late spring and summer were warm but there was coolness, mystery, gravitas and solitude in the shadows there. I made so many drawings that summer based on the sloppy grid of the old stones, which set the stage for a group of paintings I exhibited in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1994...my first show as a “real” painter.

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