JoAnne McFarland

"The Monster of Power Dress", Handmade Paper collage Dress

2021

The art of Philip Wittmann is founded on signals. For him, signs serve as a bridge between abstraction, reality and writing, too. When he was 26 years old, he began painting as a hobbyist using 'pure' abstraction. However, he believed his work lacked a solid foundation upon which to grow. ​He discovered a book on the origins of the Chinese alphabet, which origins are essentially signs, in 2008 while taking a calligraphy class. The 26 letters of our Latin alphabet are less pictorial than the Chinese characters as we know them now. He discovered that pictorial representation is more prevalent when examining the origins of alphabets—all alphabets, in fact—because there is frequently a similarity between the sign's true meaning and what it is meant to represent. For instance, the symbol for a turtle in the original Chinese script resembles a turtle. Wittmann loves signs as they leave room for interpretation. For instance, if one writes “the sky is blue”, one will make for themself a mental representation of a blue sky, even if each one-off us will probably have some nuance in our own mental representation of that blue sky. On the other hand, a sign can...

The art of Philip Wittmann is founded on signals. For him, signs serve as a bridge between abstraction, reality and writing, too. When he was 26 years ...

The art of Philip Wittmann is founded on signals. For him, signs serve as a bridge between abstraction, reality and writing, too. When he was 26 years old, he began painting as a hobbyist using 'pure' abstraction. However, he believed his work lacked a solid foundation upon which to grow. ​He discovered a book on the origins of the Chinese alphabet, which origins are essentially signs, in 2008 while taking a calligraphy class. The 26 letters of our Latin alphabet are less pictorial than the Chinese characters as we know them now. He discovered that pictorial representation is more prevalent when examining the origins of alphabets—all alphabets, in fact—because there is frequently a similarity between the sign's true meaning and what it is meant to represent. For instance, the symbol for a turtle in the original Chinese script resembles a turtle. Wittmann loves signs as they leave room for interpretation. For instance, if one writes “the sky is blue”, one will make for themself a mental representation of a blue sky, even if each one-off us will probably have some nuance in our own mental representation of that blue sky. On the other hand, a sign can...

In And His Open Arms Embraced color, line, shape, and texture collide with handwritten romantic fragments of prose on Kozuke ivory paper. This one-of-a-kind, unmounted encaustic mono...