Thomas Witte’s work is fascinated with time. He begins with slides of family photographs (images captured in a millisecond, often by an absent-minded, amateur eye), and then, through a painstaking process involving myriad drawings, multiple stencils, and meticulous spray painting, he recasts a mundane moment from the past as a vivid experience in the present. Witte’s interest in stencils began in college. After graduation, he traveled to Argentina, where he found himself drawn to the graffiti scene there, which is inundated with stencils. This investigation solidified his interest in the technique. Though many artists use a computer program to render their stencils, Witte does multiple drawings by hand of each image he uses, with each drawing focusing on a single color, or color palate present in the image. Then, he spray paints the images one drawing—or one layer of color—at a time. Though this process implies a certain fastidiousness, Witte is unscathed by blurs or smears in the paint and embraces them as mentions of the artist's hand, giving each image a unique energy. Witte uses untraditional canvasses for these images, such as industrial glass, scrap lumber, and steel shelving. Each surface is methodically prepared for the image it will hold: cut to size, sanded, and drilled for display purposes. Given this method, the images often frame themselves and need nothing beyond the surface that Witte has prepared. Witte’s studio is in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, and he salvages much of his material from condemned industrial buildings on site. These “canvases” feel three dimensional, and they alter the images they hold in striking ways, providing an uncanny discrepancy in depth between the paint and its background. The “found object” nature of his surfaces mirrors the photographs that he often uses to create the images, which seem pulled from a family album forgotten in the back of someone’s attic. Many of the photographic slides that Witte uses come from his grandfather’s slide collection, which he inherited. The pictures offer a particular vision of Americana—beach vacations, birthday parties, Sunday afternoon tailgating beside classic Cadillacs—and provide a glimpse into social and family life between the 1960’s and the 1980’s. Witte has recently expanded his range of images to include photographs of Manhattan and Brooklyn from the 1900's to the present. He’s sourced these urban images from different Internet sources, the Library of Congress, and the Brooklyn Navy Yards archives. Thus, his work begins to expand beyond his own history to include a visual history of the city in which he lives. Witte creates a collage of the past and the present in all aspects of his work. He uses old materials from the neighborhood that currently houses his studio and gives these pieces of industrial detritus a new life. He takes vintage photographs, of people and moments long forgotten, and imbues them with fresh storylines and renewed vigor. The old and the new fuse in a burst of Witte’s creative energy.

Thomas Witte's Artwork(s)

Thomas Witte's guestbook