Smallwood artist Jerry DeWitt to display critically acclaimed
rural farm paintings at
Off Track
Art in Westminster.
Show opens with a reception for the artist on Friday,
September 7, 2012 at 5:30 to 7:30 at
Off
Track Art, [
http://offtrackart.blogspot.com/]
11 Liberty Street – side entrance in the Liberty Building in historic downtown
Westminster. The show will continue through October.
Off Track Art is celebrating the art of Jerry DeWitt for its
first opening of the fall season on Friday, Sept. 7th, 2012 from
5:30--7:30, to show his beautiful watercolors from a variety of locales
including Carroll County.
“Jerry DeWitt was born in Michigan in 1933 and has been
painting, primarily watercolors, since his teenage years,” according to
information provided by the artist…
“Over 300 paintings hang in homes and businesses from Alaska
to Florida. His work has been shown in galleries in Washington, DC; Montana;
and Maryland. Mr. DeWitt’s Montana paintings were featured in American Artist
magazine.
“Mr. DeWitt enjoys traveling, and has series of paintings
from Maine and from Frederick and Carroll Counties. His subjects are often old
farm buildings or homes, as he strives to capture and retain the spirit of American
places of the heart.
“Viewers may be drawn to tranquil scenes and transported to
a quieter, more peaceful time. He has a special affinity for birds and has
painted many species. Jerry has framed many of his paintings in old barn wood,
sometimes from the very site portrayed.
“Most notable of these paintings is his award-winning
portrait of the Wye Oak, framed in the wood from that famous tree.
“That sound echoes back to his grandfather's Depression-era
farm at the end of a lane in Bedford County, Pa. He was just 2 years old when
his father left home for good and the youngster was uprooted from Lansing,
Mich., to live with his grandparents.
“And in between trips to the pasture to the hand-dug well
for another bucket of water, or out to the shed for an arm load of firewood,
the sights and sounds and smells of farm life wrapped themselves around Jerry's
memory, eventually finding their way to paint and paper more than 30 years
later…
After Mr. DeWitt served in the Navy during the Korean War, “became
a house carpenter building houses in Maryland and Florida.
“Years later, with his wife, Kris, and four children, Jerry
answered his calling — back on the farm, with paints and brushes instead of
water bucket and firewood. The family went to Florida for a visit to his wife's
parents. Jerry stayed behind in Hagerstown.
“He had a week all to himself. So he went to a five and 10
store in town and bought a set of watercolors and some brushes and then headed
out to a barn he'd spotted many times along Interstate-70 on his way to a house
construction site.
“DeWitt was 37 when he sat out there on the east side of
Cosen's Barn with his new set of paints.
“‘That was it. Time disappeared,’ he says. ‘Something was
opening up inside of me, and I could hear those cowbells. I could smell my
grandfather's barn.’”
