David Hewitt

David Hewitt's paintings, the magical art of show and tell, besides being about self-reflection, discourse and creative development, all important concerns of Hewitt's, has always been about the theatre of real life. Whether he was painting the indigenous people of Ecuador where he lived for seventeen years, recreating magazine covers that question the authenticity of original images or composing a vanitas to lovingly solidify the memory of a family friend, Hewitt's painted tableaus, much like the man-made dioramas found in museums of natural history, are dramatic stage sets that reveal the fecundity of every day life.

In Hewitt's newest series, his Middle East landscape paintings (2000-06) – Hewitt is currently living in the United Arab Emirates where he teaches design at the American University of Sharjah north of Dubai – the artist, tackling both time and space, transforms a solid and very real landscape, into a wondrous, eye-opening vista in which the sense of place is simultaneously here and there.

The time and energy that Hewitt spends researching, composing and painting his pictures, stretches out over a period of months. Step one is finding the perfect site. Once Hewitt selects his site he then returns several times, at different times of day, and takes, sometimes as many as one hundred, digital photographs. Using Adobe Photoshop, Hewitt spends a week or more working out his compositional ideas. With plotter prints for reference and a palette knife in hand, to mix tones of each brush stroke so that it sits in proper relation to the next, Hewitt, always starting at the horizon, begins to build his painting.

Superb usage and gradation of color aside, the strength behind Hewitt's paintings, the very thing that give them their reverberating, near-hallucinatory presence, is the artist's faultlessly painted selection and placement of the images, some of them imported from other sources, that comprise each picture. While the subject matter, be it a voluptuous desert painted in Turneresque blues, glass skyscrapers along Sheikh Zayed Road or a shimmering chorus of pink Flamingos, at first glance appears to be self-explanatory, as our eye scans the picture, disparate clues – a pair of shoes left on a reef at low tide, a dust storm to the right of the mosque, condensation trails from fighter bombers that just crossed the sky – seem to be telling another story.

With our collective memories being joggled we soon find ourselves trying to understand, how, in such a simple landscape, the artist has managed to paint mystery, meaning and our very own identity onto his canvas. So far Hewitt's secret, no doubt even to himself, remains a mystery, which of course is often what the very best art is about.

—Edward Rubin
Art&Antiques Magazine