About This Item:

• Oil + Pastel on Canvas

• 37” x 48”

• 2023

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:

“Foundling” shows a young man reaching down to cradle the head of an infant, swaddled on a bed. Above the child a young woman floats toward the top of the canvas, seemingly severed from the body of the canvas but still very much part of the picture. Her face, unreadable, is angled down toward the child. The man’s features are mostly wiped away, as if by a kind of road-rash of emotional overload, scraped aside toward a new identity. The child, happily, is content and unconcerned by these tensions and hints of injury. This composition came together from several sources, visually and in terms of life experiences. What I see in the image now is that the woman is experiencing a sort of freedom following the arduous process of childbearing, and the explosive transformative power of birth itself. There is about her a sort of weird calm, a deep level of shock. And the man is ravaged, almost erased by the presence of the child. He reaches toward the baby in a gesture of blessing, tempered with existential dread. This then is not literally a painting of a “foundling”, of an adoption, but of the strange truth that every child is “found” by its parents – a mysterious rebus compounded of inescapable difference and inevitable continuity.