About This Item:

• Latex House Paint + Spray Paint on Canvas

• 60” x 50”

• 1984

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:

The painting titled “Family” from 1984 stands at the gateway to all these efforts. Executed in colorful TruValue house paint, chalk, and spray paint, it depicts a man with green hair (who looks something like me),situated in a landscape with a blonde woman (because I was using cut-out sponge rubber shapes to imprint her features it looks very little like my partner Loren Hyler); an angelic looking child sits between us, playing with a very “gestural”,roughly rendered ball. My influences and interests at the time were the paintings of the contemporary transavantgardia (German and Italian artists whose expressive figural paintings were widely exhibited in the 1980’s),and others active in the wider neo-expressionist movement. Many of these were included in shows in New York, where I often was able to see them first hand. Among somewhat earlier approaches I was also deeply affected by Richard Diebenkorn and Willem deKooning – plus a long list of moody painters spanning the two centuries between Goya, Ryder, and more current masters like Leon Golub and the School of London painters.