About This Item:

• Tar, Black Pastel + Latex Binder on Canvas

• 44” x 34”

• 1996

Douglas Max Utter (b 1950) is an award winning Cleveland based artist and writer, whose work has been shown extensively since the mid 1980’s, with over forty one- person shows in Cleveland, New York, Phoenix and Germany. Utter’s work in painting and criticism has been recognized with a 2011 Creative Workforce Fellowship, three Individual Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the Best Painting Award at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show (1987), and journalism awards from the Cleveland Press Club and the Poets and Writers Guild of Greater Cleveland. He is the recipient of a 2013 Cleveland Arts Prize, Lifetime Achievement Award.

Artist Statement:

To return to the paintings of family and their sources, some were based directly on religious-themed works by Renaissance masters like Titian and Dieric Bouts, Rembrandt and El Greco. Others alluded to such subjects through the medium of casual family snapshots. The two “Holy Family” paintings included here are examples of this: the tar-based work from 1996 was commissioned by an actress and her husband living in New York. The other, made six years before in spray paint with layers of acrylic glaze, presents a less specific trio of mythic persons, with their halos intact suffused by an almost medieval glow, like stained glass at evening. Emotionally, the darker work is the more joyful and alive of the two. By contrast, the 1990 figures are strongly drawn, but seem to lament the gradual erasure of identity by time and manner.