Joshua Wit­ten

www​.joshuawit​ten​.com
Port­land, OR

Curbs and Stoops: Tell us a lit­tle about where you live and work.

Joshua Wit­ten:  I live in the great state of Indi­ana and am cur­rently a fram­ing man­ager at Michaels, the arts and crafts store.

Curbs and Stoops: What kind of media do you prefer?

Joshua Wit­ten:  I can’t really say that I pre­fer one media over another. I sup­pose if I had to pick one it would be graphite as it was my first love. There is some­thing about the sim­plic­ity of pen­cil and paper that is very appeal­ing to me how­ever I love paint­ing, print­mak­ing and sculp­ture as well.

Curbs and Stoops: You have a really unique tech­nique when it comes to paint­ing. How did you come to this style?

Joshua Wit­ten:  How did I come to this style? That is a very good ques­tion. I think it began with hiero­glyphs. Seem­ingly all cul­tures used a hiero­glyphic method at some point in their artis­tic his­tory regard­less of who they were or where they were. To me hiero­glyphs are like a uni­ver­sal human lan­guage that trans­mits infor­ma­tion across time and space. With this in mind I had been mak­ing var­i­ous draw­ings and prints that com­bined these ancient ele­ments with ideas of mod­ernism and post­mod­ernism in order to cre­ate some­thing new that was also rooted in the past. The two can­vases that I sent to you for the “Men­ace to Pro­pri­ety“ show are part of a larger series of ten enti­tled, “Occam’s Razor and Other Short Sto­ries.” The series was an oppor­tu­nity to take every­thing that I had done on paper and apply it to can­vas with the idea of mak­ing paint­ings that looked like my draw­ings and prints. I tried a lot of dif­fer­ent tech­niques before finally set­tling on ink, oil and pen­cil. The final result was an amal­ga­ma­tion of media, like a hybrid of graphic min­i­mal­ism with heavy empha­sis on black. I sup­pose in the end I would say that I came to this style through con­straint. Charles Eames once said that design depends largely on con­straints and I think he was right on the money.

Curbs and Stoops: What is your work­ing process? can you tell us a lit­tle about how you go about trans­form­ing your ideas from thoughts to mate­r­ial objects?

Joshua Wit­ten:  I always have ideas float­ing around in my head. Some get writ­ten down, some don’t. Some come to the fore­front while oth­ers stay back. Typ­i­cally, I start think­ing of cer­tain ones more than oth­ers for vary­ing rea­sons. Some­times I don’t know the rea­sons until much later if I ever know them at all. In any case, those ideas that I think about most are usu­ally the ones that I start doing research and prepara­tory sketches for. These become the foun­da­tion that I use to make the final art­work, be it a paint­ing or a draw­ing or a print.

Curbs and Stoops: What do you draw inspi­ra­tion from?

Joshua Wit­ten:  Any­thing and everything.

Curbs and Stoops: Artists that you admire? alive? dead?

Joshua Wit­ten:  There are a lot of them so this could be a long list. Let’s start with the dead ones…they are in no par­tic­u­lar order…Picasso, Warhol, Degas, Klimt, Frida and Diego, Hock­ney, Schiele, Balthus, Basquiat, Franz Kline, Pol­lock, Tamara de Lem­picka, Mary Cas­satt, Vin­cent Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Michelan­gelo, Bot­ti­celli, Harunobu, Osamu Tezuka, and Rock­well. Now mov­ing onto the living…also in no par­tic­u­lar order…Audrey Kawasaki, Amy Sol, Sylvia Ji, Murakami, Wal­ton Ford, Frank Miller, and Julian Schn­abel.

Curbs and Stoops: You have a fan­tas­tic piece called the anti­grav­ity machine that depicts a boom­box and a break dancer. are you a dancer your­self? a music lover? what kind of tunes get you in a cre­ative space?

Joshua Wit­ten:  I wouldn’t call myself a dancer per say but I can shake it if I need to because I truly am a lover of music. “The anti-​gravity machine” rep­re­sents my great fond­ness of the hip hop cul­ture and aes­thetic. At the time I was lis­ten­ing to a lot of Com­mon and At The Drive-​In and if you look closely enough you can see those influ­ences in the work for sure.

Curbs and Stoops: Where have you shown your work? Where will you be show­ing in the near future?

Joshua Wit­ten:  I have shown my work in a num­ber of places. I have shown locally in Indi­ana at Artlink Con­tem­po­rary Art Gallery and at The Spu­ri­ous Fugi­tive Gallery which I am sorry to say closed its doors in March. I have also shown at Eclec­tix Gallery and Gallery Nucleus which are both in the great state of Cal­i­for­nia. In the near future I will be show­ing at Artlink Gallery and the Fenario Gallery for the “Men­ace to Pro­pri­ety.” show.

Curbs and Stoops: Occam’s razor is the the­ory by which i live my life. sim­plify, sim­plify, sim­plify. You have a series calles “occam’s razor and other short sto­ries.” Can you tell me a bit about this series and about your rela­tion­ship to the the­o­rem of occam’s razor?

Joshua Wit­ten:  As I said before, “Occam’s Razor and Other Short Sto­ries” tech­ni­cally speak­ing was an oppor­tu­nity to take every­thing that I had done on paper and apply it to can­vas with the idea of mak­ing paint­ings that looked like my draw­ings and prints. At the time I was think­ing about glob­al­ism, world trade, and the envi­ron­ment. So, the­mat­i­cally the series began to develop with these ideas in mind. “The Tea Party” for exam­ple is as much about China and the United States as it is about as it is about Alice and the March Hare…which leads me to the over­all title of the series, “Occam’s Razor and other Short Sto­ries.” Orig­i­nally, I planned to have the entire cast in my inter­pre­ta­tion of the tea party how­ever con­straint led me to cut out the Mad Hat­ter and Door Mouse and focus solely on the rela­tion­ship between Alice and the March Hare. Fol­low­ing suit, I sim­pli­fied the con­tent and imagery in all of the other paint­ings in the series. As this sim­pli­fi­ca­tion process con­tin­ued, and tech­nique and theme began to merge together, I remem­bered the idea of Occam’s Razor and felt it would be a good fit for the series.

Curbs and Stoops: “The golden age” is a com­plex series that seems to be deal­ing with the com­modi­ti­za­tion of icons, and our soci­eties lust for logos and brand­ing. Can you tell me more about this series? is it ongoing?

Joshua Wit­ten:  “The Golden Age” is an ongo­ing series that was orig­i­nally going to be about mythol­ogy of var­i­ous sorts and while it still kind of is, it has also become a com­men­tary on the “com­modi­ti­za­tion of icons, and our soci­eties lust for logos and brand­ing” as you so elo­quently put it. While attend­ing art school there was a visit from the artist Robert Stack­house. He told one of the stu­dents to paint some­thing from this day and age like a Nike Swoosh and the idea of art and logos and brand­ing has stuck with me. So, of course my golden apple of the hes­perides is rep­re­sented by an Apple Com­puter Logo.

Curbs and Stoops: What do you do when you get stuck on an image?

Joshua Wit­ten:  I start another one.

Curbs and Stoops: How do you reward your­self when you fin­ish a piece?

Joshua Wit­ten:  I don’t reward myself when I fin­ish art­work, but it sounds like a good idea. Maybe I will buy the new Prince album when I fin­ish with the next one.

Curbs and Stoops: Any­one ever get any of your images tat­tooed on them? Seems like they’d make for great ink!

Joshua Wit­ten:  A cou­ple of peo­ple have actu­ally tat­tooed them­selves with my art. I recently drew one for my good friend who is a union man in Indi­anapo­lis. It is a bit daunt­ing to think of my art per­ma­nently etched onto another per­son, but when it is I can’t help but feel the love.

Curbs and Stoops: Favorite children’s book grow­ing up?

Joshua Wit­ten:  “The Lit­tle Engine That Could”

Curbs and Stoops: Favorite board game?

Joshua Wit­ten:  Triv­ial Pursuit

Curbs and Stoops: If you had a super power what would it be?

Joshua Wit­ten:  Enlightenment