Photographs and Memories – David Witbeck and Fishwife

David thought it would be fun to somehow use the photo in his art and started a painting. “It became too much of a copy of the photograph, so I abandoned it. It still sits unfinished, face against my studio wall.” Luckily for us the photograph continued to poke at his imagination. “I kept looking at the photo. I knew there was something that eventually would come from it.” One morning, months later, he walked into his studio, picked up a piece of charcoal and in an hour or so had a drawing that resulted in one of his most recent woodblock prints, “Fishwife”.

David Witbeck in BIRD – A Maine Art Show

The gull perched on the bollard in David Witbeck’s Harbor Gulls is watching you. They are fight- ing over chum in Free Lunch. And one is calling out to the sunrise in Morning Gulls. When they are not the subject, Witbeck uses birds in his paintings as a call to action, a source of drama, and sometimes a point of humor.