2014 Goetemann Artist Residency

Distinguished Artist/Teacher, Tim Hawkesworth

Painting is a visceral experience for Irish artist Timothy Hawkesworth — visceral in the way his canvases look, sprawling with coils and tangles of paint; and by his own testimony.

He talks about painting as a “push pull” experience between the marks he is making on the canvas and the image struggling to emerge. “The process of painting becomes a lived experience, part of life, not a reflection of an ideal,” he has written.

Hawkesworth grew up and went to college in Ireland, but has been living, teaching and exhibiting in the United States for nearly three decades. He may be familiar to Berkshire artists through his participation in the annual Art New England workshops at Bennington College.

His paintings and drawings are spontaneous, energetic constructions of pigment and line that celebrate the physicality of art-making and invite the viewer into the act as well.

David Witbeck, painter

In the paraphrased words of the late Edgar Whitney, a respected art educator and watercolorist, an artist is a “shape-maker, a symbol-finder and an entertainer”.

Having been a photographer for the more than three decades, the greatest joy I have as a painter is freedom from objective reality. I can bend, twist, stretch, exaggerate and simplify the things I see. I can put things in and leave things out. I can paint how things make me feel instead of simply what they look like. I can even completely make things up. It’s a joy to be able to evoke an emotional response with line, shape and color.

David Witbeck initially studied graphic arts at Pratt Institute in the mid ’60s, but with the social turmoil of those times and what he considered the inanity of the 1960’s NY art scene, he decided that photography was a more relevant pursuit. His first photographs were of workers at the now long gone Fulton Fish Market. He moved to Rochester, NY and briefly studied photojournalism at RIT and subsequently worked as a photographer’s assistant and photographer. Eventually the desire for financial security trumped the interest in photography and he became a Teamster driving tractor-trailers for six years.
In 1980, Witbeck was accepted at Rhode Island School of Design where he earned a BFA in photography in 1982. For the next 25 years he had a successful career as a freelance photographer doing mostly editorial and corporate collateral work. Eventually commercial photography became less enjoyable and he rediscovered his original love of painting. Since 2007 he has been painting full time in his studio in Pawtucket, RI. His current work springs from his lifelong love of the sea and fascination with commercial fishing. He’s best known for his iconic and irreverent “fishermen” paintings. His work is exhibited in several galleries along the New England coast.

Pal Gumpen

Pal Gumpen is an exciting contemporary artist from Norway who is presently working in the Czech Republic.  His work has been included in group exhibitions in Beijing, Prague, South Korea, Germany, England, and Norway. He writes, “The ways that people organize, construct, and understand their individual realities, in light of personal psychology and history, society, and the influence of science and technology, is, widely speaking, the main interest of my practice.”  While he has “an affinity for tradition and stability,” he also believes in “testing foundations”  – introducing the idiosyncratic, the humorous, the disparate element that removes what might be considered romantic or predictable from an art process that is fluid and responsive to immediate personal associations and connection to community.

By “testing foundations”, I do not mean by outright provocation, which seldom seems to serve other functions than creating clearer schisms, but rather by skewing the focus somewhat. For example, on your website, you make a strong point for how the area presents a dramatic stimulus to visual artists, and is renown for it’s light. This, to me, would be an invitation to focus on anything but light & drama, as those aspects have presumably been explored very well be- fore. For example, what would the results be if one measured the dramatic coastline with GPS, or a thread, an unreliable rubber band, or a meter long stick?

He will be receiving an MA at the College for the Arts in Prague, Czech Republic, has a BA in Fine Arts from University College in Falmouth, England and has studied History of Religions in Bergen, Norway.

Sarah Sutro, painting

In Dhaka and Bangkok where I lived for several years, I worked with an international group of artists, learning to make natural inks from organic materials. My current work infuses these transparent layers of color with themes of time, infinite scale, and tabular structure. Large overlapping marks of natural color, and black ink marks depict the intersection of nature and culture, celebrating the aliveness and uniqueness of natural and invented worlds.  The paintings are abstract, yet the work evokes a physical presence that is connected to land and water.

Sarah Sutro, a painter who has focused recently on alternative ink drawings, earned a BFA from Cornell and Yale, and an MFA from University of the Arts, London. With solo and group shows in Boston, New York, San Diego, Berkeley, Belgrade, Bangkok, Montenegro, Dhaka, and London, her work is in collections locally and internationally. A recipient of a Pollock Krasner Grant, she has been a resident at the American Academy of Rome, MacDowell Colony, Ossabaw Island Foundation, Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and Art Dulcinium, Montenegro. She has been a faculty over many years at colleges and universities in the area, including Emerson College, AIB at Lesley University and Mass College of Art and Design, and now lives and works in N. Adams, MA. Her work can be seen in Joseph Carroll and Sons’ Boston Drawing Project.