ART NEWS: The Works Of Dan Witz

This is a painting. Last week, Animal featured a selection of hyper-realistic mosh pit paintings by New York based artist Dan Witz.

While amazing, the mosh pit paintings only begin to crack the surface of this artist's considerable talent.

Witz began his career as a street artist with his 1979 series Birds. Witz painted over forty humming birds in Lower Manhattan but excluded the neighborhood of Soho, "... there was enough art there."

"Each bird took about 2 hours. It seems difficult to believe now but when cops or supers caught me I never got in trouble. In fact, usually when they saw I was painting a hummingbird they'd let me finish."

Witz has continued with various street based projects over the past twenty years. His 2009 series, Dark Doings, attempts to "exploit our collective tendency towards sleepwalking by inserting outrageous things right out there in plain view that are also practically invisible." Witz places ghostly images of humans and animals in the overlooked windows of Brooklyn and Los Angeles neighborhoods. He explores this idea further in the 2010 series, In Plain Sight.

But for me, it's Witz's painting series Nightscapes which is most captivating. Dark, lonely and beautiful, Witz "creates his pieces using a distinctive process; first by printing a digital photograph onto a canvas as an underpainting and then adding layers of oil paint and transparent glazes."

"In my lifetime there’s been a revolution in representational capabilites comparable to the invention of oil paint in the 15th century. The opportunities to push on to new forms today are just unbelievably exciting. To ignore them, from my point of view, would be a ridiculous waste. So photoshop and photography have become as important tools for me as paint and brushes. I don’t for a moment consider myself to be a photographer or a digital artist though: these are paintings; I’m definitely a painter."

SOURCES: Animal, Dan Witz, DFN Gallery.