MARTIN WITTFOOTH
Seasonal Shift
In 1842, Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole completed his famous series The Voyage of Life, in which four paintings offered an allegorical interpretation of a man’s existence. In each work a figure on a boat floats through stages of life—Childhood, Youth, Manhood and Old Age—accompanied by an angel who offers more assistance in childhood and old age, and more independence in youth and manhood.
More than 150 years later, and in the same Hudson River Valley where Cole was painting, Martin Wittfooth is also examining allegorical aspects of life. “Pretty much all the work I’ve done over the last decade has been allegorical, with lots of symbolism to facilitate a narrative,” Wittfooth says from his studio, about an hour’s drive north of New York City. “What’s really been driving my most recent works is an allegory of the seasons and how we age as human beings. So far I’ve done pieces for spring, summer and fall, with a winter piece that isn’t quite done yet. I’m trying to say more in the paintings but also add a cohesive dialogue among the pieces that acts as an invitation into the works as they surround their themes.” Wittfooth will be showing these new pieces, as well as older work, in a new retrospective now open at Muroff-Kotler Visual Arts Gallery at SUNY Ulster in Stone Ridge, New York. Many of the works on display will be quite large, including his famous Wildmother painting, which measures 54 by 107 inches. The work was used as the cover for the album Feral Roots by the band Rival Suns, which had the image blown up even bigger for a banner that appears behind the band
during their live shows. “The band is in Europe now so the work is certainly being seen a lot lately,” Wittfooth says.
The artist has found he’s been continuously interested in the ideas of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, particularly their ideas about archetypes. Wittfooth is especially drawn to the “two cosmic spirits” that play large roles in art: the sun and the moon. He says, “Within the natural world there are cycles and orders of things. These are constants and they are cyclical, but not as temporal as the ever-changing condition of the human enterprise. It’s a device I paint—the sun and the moon—and there is an allusion to each in every work.”
In Spring, for instance, Wittfooth presents a fable: a large house cat playing with a ball of yarn in a lush field of flowers as small dogs play and fight around the feline placed mostly in the center of the painting. “There is the cat and dog dynamic going on, and then there is also the suggestion that they are all an extension of us, of how we think we interact with nature,” the artist says. “It’s from within the human lens that we see how we transform nature into extensions of ourselves. When we interact with pets, we become part of their stories, and they become part of ours.”
In Autumn, Wittfooth turns to the mythology of Apollo and the python, with Apollo represented by a lion as it bites into the bright skin of a snake. Like Spring, the composition of the work has a strong “sun” component that is brightly lit and strongly painted, alongside a shadowed “moon” area that casts a mysterious tone into the corners of each painting.
“More than anything duality plays a big factor in my work,” he says. “All the pieces are there to complement off one another, and to serve as a contrast. It’s there in the big aspects, but also in the tiny details. Just look at Spring—there are crescent moons in the eyeballs of the cat. That duality, the yin and yang, is everywhere.”