Thursday, August 28, 2014

Various Drawings by Dale Wittig, circa 1984


Studies for Lost, Abandoned, or Discarded Paintings





 











Some of the paintings, for which the drawings above were studies, actually reached completion, while others were left unfinished.  The naked running woman was made for an elaborate pastel drawing, which may still exist in an old portfolio that may be protecting it from a squirrel’s ravenous claws and teeth.  The Self Portrait as viewed from behind and the Shuttle Debris on the Moon were among those paintings in oil on gessoed burlap that were stored and lost somewhere on the old Dopp Farm.  The Fire Eater with Pigs and Trainer was part of a series of smaller paintings in oil on unstretched canvas that I tacked up on the plywood enclosing building sites around Avenues A and B near Houston on the Lower East Side back in 1986.  The two drawings here that I’m most happy with now are the one at top and the one at bottom.  The first shows Isidore Ducasse and Arthur Rimbaud  with an empty tea cup and the latter shows Godzilla versus the Smog Monster (ゴジラ対ヘドラ, Gojira tai Hedora) on a Philco TV, which was drawn for a painting depicting the death of Aikichi Kuboyama, the radio operator of the fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, who died of Radiation Poisoning, thirty years earlier in 1954, caused by an American Hydrogen Bomb test in the Pacific.

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