ARTIST STATEMENT:
Parker Wittenberg
I paint figures and landscapes in oil. The work moves between plein air observation and studio composition, often drawing from both — a remembered light, a sensed weight, a color I noticed somewhere and held onto.
Figures have been my focus since childhood. I’m drawn to people in repose, caught off guard, in moments where you can only guess what they’re thinking. I work from live models in the studio and from figures I’ve encountered in the city — people glimpsed in Echo Park, on the street, in restaurants. The painting that emerges is rarely a portrait. It’s an interpretation.
Color is where I take the most freedom. I rarely repeat a palette. I’ll start with one set of relationships and shift mid-painting if the work asks for it. Some paintings come together quickly, alla prima. Others build slowly through glazes. The technique follows the painting, not the other way around.
Although the work reads as representational, abstract passages run through it. I want the viewer to bring their own memory to the image — to find something in it that feels familiar without being explained.
