By Michelle Cheung
Martin Wittfooth "A Day Without Rain" Collection of Rick Petry
The whimsy and eeriness of Norsk fairytales, the colors and style of the Dutch School were the things that popped into my head when I first encountered Martin Wittfooth’s apocalyptic animal paintings. So when I met the artist recently in his studio in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, I was not at all surprised by the space’s rustic interiors, his gracious offer of a cup of tea, and classical radio playing in the background. It all makes sense; it’s the Martin Wittfooth as I have imagined. By no means, however, does he live in the Baroque past. Like any twenty-nine year old in Brooklyn, he dresses with the sophistication and edginess of a hipster, supposedly loves booze, and regularly checks Facebook on his Macbook Pro tucked among the moody frames in his painting nook.
Wittfooth’s Dutch painting style and Norsk fairytale imageries can be attributed to his childhood growing up in Finland. “That style and imagery are definitely there as a sort of backdrop to my imagery,” explained Wittfooth. “That’s the stuff that I react to as a kid and imagery that I am most familiar with as well. I think that my imagery would be completely different if I grew up in California.”
If there was one thing this Canadian-born, Finnish-raised, American-educated artist learned from his illustration background (it was his BFA major), it would be to create a story. “Starting off as an illustrator set me to the path of thinking about joining a story with my art,” said Wittfooth. “What eventually stuck with me is the idea that the natural realm is starting to suffer under our way. I think it’s not something that can necessarily be ignored but it has been for so long. I feel like that’s sort of what lent weight to my work as I was thinking how I can contribute to that dialogue a little bit.” It’s the “what if” that Wittfooth is interested in portraying. According to him, his artwork is not based on any kind of real forecast but is meant to inspire conversation about the topics of human destruction. When probed about his paintings as a response to actual events, Wittfooth further elaborated, “Although there are people who see the message in my work, I still want to keep it broad enough so every viewer can take something personal out of it. That’s why I’m not really hung up on specific events. It’s more on a symbolic level than a kind of dooms day level. I’m not really going for that disaster movie scenario. I don’t think I’ll ever do an actual snapshot of Katrina but it’s things within my work that allude to those events having happened and potentially happening again.”
Martin Wittfooth "Suppertime in the Sky"
Humans are never a part of the picture in Wittfooth’s work. When asked why, he explained, “The world that I am creating for myself is one in which humanity is gone in terms of a figurative sense. We are never in these pieces. The stage is set by our hands. The animals are always interacting in man made environment in potentially responding to man made events yet I feel that animals, in contemporary context, are really the victims or witnesses of what we are creating. That’s already happening now but I’m envisioning a world when we’re long gone. Our influences are still felt many many years after the fact. So a lot of times, in my work, it’s not so much that we are no longer doing anything actively but maybe we set things in motion and what’s been played out is these animals just respond to that new world.” He then clarified that even though his work tends to be about an impending doom, he still tries to infuse it with some degree of hope. “I’m not really ever hung up on chaos and mayhem in my work,” he added. “It’s almost the fear of that always on the horizon yet we still have time to do something about it.”
Alongside his paintings, Wittfooth has also worked on individual installation pieces and sculptural work. He has used frames as vehicles to extend the imagery in his paintings. According to the artist, he wants to step outside the preconceived notion of just a frame to enclose a painting but, rather, let some of the imagery spill into the frame itself.” In one of my favorite of Wittfooth’s paintings, Saints Preserve Us, the painting is surrounded by a 3D installation element, a bookcase decorated with antique objects and taxidermic insects.
Martin Wittfooth "Saints Preserve Us"
Martin Wittfooth’s upcoming show, Tempest, at the Copro Gallery in Santa Monica, will include paintings and a site-specific installation on the theme of storms. It opens on February 13 to March 6. At the end of this year at the Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle, he will be presenting a body of work based on a potential Ice Age. He is also set to appear alongside eight other artists of similar discipline in a documentary by designer and filmmaker, Mark Murphy.
