Artist Statement

For the past five years I've workded on several themes in rotation; still life using toysand food to explore narrative dramas and black comedy, urban/suburban landscape as well as chaotic wooded scenes, and Alzheimer's heads.

This work is all on the subject of landscape. It includes apartment buildings, suburban houses, scenes on the canal at dusk, woods, and groupings of trees. The apartment buildings are my contemporary version of the towers of Italian nobility found in Tuscany. The woods scenes have to do with finding the balance between order and chaos, calligraphy and geometry. In many of the prints I use large areas of mass/tone to establish a frieze across the picture plane. The use of gesture to establish space is of paramount importance to the expressive content of my work. It is seen in as a counterpoint to the small scale of the pieces and is intended to reinforce the picture plane while at the sme time establishing illusionistic space. The suburban houses are a vehicle for exploring the relationship between the blime and the sublime. DUSK is a new theme for me and it is related to my growing awareness of my waning powers as an artist. To achieve the effects of impending darkness, I used the etching techniqe of the creeping bite and its precise timing to arrive at the desired result.

Biography

Founder of the Washington Studio School, Newman received both his MFA and BFA from American University. Recipient of numerous awards including the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and Kreeger Painting Award, Newman’s prints, paintings and drawings have been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Corcoran Gallery of Art and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor among others.