John Witty - beginnings of collections

The last project helped me move out in a new direction. After over seven years, I feel like I have reached a point where drawing is no longer characterized by a constant sense of frustration. I want to celebrate by focusing my work on drawing. But what to do with my drawings, what to say? A question that can go on forever, thankfully. With this project I tried to use my drawings to explore different contexts. I have been interested in the many burial places and memorial sites created for foreigners around Florence. I continued on from the Cimitero degli Inglesi by drawing from the monuments erected to a young Indian Maharajah and a Portuguese Prince. I focused on the effigies, the images made to commemorate the individual. Then I was stuck. What to do with them? Take them with me to Germany. And once I get there? Stick them on the surface of a grave atop a recent burial in the cemetery of the village where I lived for four months? Seemed like a good idea at the time. Well, later I realized that the image I had created didn't say as much as it seemed to at first. It was simply funerary sculpture in the context that one would expect to see it in. From this block a new task emerged. Now try putting the funerary image in other contexts. The context I chose to explore was the area of Piazza della Republica - the former Jewish ghetto and thriving market place of Florence - all destroyed in the late 19th century to celebrate the Risorgimento by erecting some neoclassicist buildings in their place. A lost era, actually an obliterated area. Does my "dead guy" lying around the piazza as tourists eat their gelato serve as a reminder of what has been lost, of what lies below? In the end, I don't think so, but in the critique people responded to many other aspects of the piece that I can take with me for future projects. One of the most concrete lessons was that the digital photos that were the most successful were those in which my drawing was visibly incorporated into the composition of the shot. Something to remember. I need to think of the more basic impact of the images I have chosen, and focus on how this interacts with the new context compositionally and thematically, but on a more visually direct level.

Onwards and upwards with collections. For a while now a collection of grotesques has been emerging. I have also been drawn to portrait busts all over the place, especially the "funny" ones - i.e. double chinned widows, old men with their mouths hanging open, and ladies with hairdos. Its funny to imagine that these people, while they were alive, made a clear decision that they wanted themselves permanently commemorated in this way. Put your imperfections on display in perfect detail for all eternity. Or maybe they were just so vain that they saw their busts as paragons of beauty. I think there is a similar dynamic in the way we perceive things on our museum visits. When we first walk into the Uffizi, we look up at the ceiling of grotesques and exclaim, "how beautiful!" But is it really, are all those slimy mer - people and strange beasts really beautiful? The Medici had them painted because they thought it would up their prestige. This style of painting was perceived as an imitation of the ancient Roman style - and that is really the only reason the Medici wanted it on their ceiling - so they could be associated with the power and prestige of ancient Rome. So is that really beautiful? Some old rich family's struggle to legitimize their political power mongering? These questions are where I want to work from, at the same time asking myself why I really do find the grotesques so beautiful. Why do they attract me? What do they say to me? Why do I want to collect them and why do I dream of painting them on my own ceiling? I may organize my investigation of these strange characters with a narrative or a new language of commemoration. For example, Olimpia Aldobrandini, a long dead rich woman who still stares down at you from atop a pedestal in her palace in Rome, is surrounded by male and female mer - people who hold colorful scrolls. At some point she made the decision to have those painted on her hallway, probably for the same reason the Medici did. Today the mer - people represent that period, and her decision of how to represent her inherited wealth. Long after her death they commemorate her ostentatious life style - the decisions she made. I work towards a way to represent this visually.... I have spent time drawing her bust and others from various angles, as well as the spaces in which they reside. The most fun part is focusing on the details that surround them....

Another great discovery in Rome (unrelated to any projects or assignments) was Cravaggio. Bliss. The Calling of St. Matthew in San Luigi dei Francesi, and the Madonna of the Pilgrims in St. Agostino. Who is St. Matthew? It could be anyone and that is the miracle. The old man with the glasses could be a detail from a Rembrandt painting. I love the young man's desperate hands collapsed against his precious coins that no longer satisfy him. In the Madonna of the Pilgrims, the feet are real, dirty pilgrim's feet, and the old lady praying has no teeth. These details are what make the experience.