Presenting "Still Here" by David Titterington
"Death Lives In Every Moment" Oil on panel 2014
Here is a sneak peek of David Titterington’s exhibition "Still Here" The show features 21 of David's detailed and breathtaking oil paintings. David studied oil painting with Robert Julius Brawley at KU before moving to Japan, where for five years he researched the 88-temple Shikoku pilgrimage and painted sacred sites. He received his MFA from KU in 2013 and currently teaches Art at Haskell Indian Nations University.
Don't miss this amazing show open May 25th to June 22nd!
Here is the Artist Statement:
Landscapes are a kind of ritual for me, an “outward expression of an inward state,” and are symbolic, like language. Land and sky are situated inside of us as we are situated inside of them. Through the languages of realist landscape painting and religious icon painting, I aim to bring attention to the ways in which humans and landscapes exchange ideas and change one another.
There is healing power in mountain silence and desert indifference. Landscapes point out what matters, or what, as a material substrate for the meta-system of culture, remains. Like our genes, they are more permanent than we are, and thus the landscape becomes a symbol for the eternal. It also becomes a site where revelations occur. As we move into the wilderness, the lights of civilization recede and then disappear. The landscape of nature gets bigger, and the stars can speak to one of vast reaches of cosmic time; stones murmur information from deep time; worms, rivers, winds and rains tell stories of ethereal, fleeting time where nothing lasts long enough to even exist.
Beneath our feet is a dreamy place where the excrement of one species becomes the nutrient of another; where ghosts, demons, minerals, bones and the abyss mingle; where the ever-present iron core lives and enables all of our actions and all of our lives.
Some of these paintings are a way for me to visualize the impenetrable realm within the planet, a place more difficult to gaze into than deep space! We can see the background radiation from the Big Bang, but remain locked out of the space right beneath us. Just a couple years ago scientists found an entire ocean some 400 miles beneath North America. The hidden ocean is apparently locked inside a blue crystalline mineral, ringwoodite, and holds three times as much water than exists in all the world’s surface oceans. They say this discovery may help explain where Earth’s water supply came from and how subterranean water affects plate tectonics. In a way it also confirms mythic origins of the oceans — Leviathan, the blue, crystal-coated water dragon slumbering inside the planet.
For more info on the artist please visit https://davidtitterington.com/