DAVID
ROTHERMEL
CONTEMPORARY

"The painting succeeds though it may appear, at first glance, to be trying to compete with, or steal from, the ultimate creator; it reveals itself over time to be about other things entirely --things like the difficulty of truly seeing what we are looking at, the sense that we are always on the other side of where the truth is, the unnerving feeling that everything lovely exists right at the edge of total darkness."

   --Virginia Campbell, writing of Rothermel's skyscape, "Silent Crescendo," for Southwest Art magazine. 

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"Watercolor has a tendency to do what it wants to do. When I paint watercolors, I think 'God, just give me fifty percent.'"     --David Rothermel
 

"Desert Dialogues" is a series of eleven giclées of watercolor-and-pastel landscape paintings from our archives. These digital archival prints are reproduced using "permanent pigments" on 100% rag archival paper --the same watercolor paper on which the originals were painted.

 

David individually hand-embellishes each giclée with pastels which lends it a quality of immediacy and intimacy that usually is only obtained by an original work costing many times more. They are 40” X 29-3/4” with an hand-torn deckle-edge. The prints are float-mounted, matted and framed with the overall dimensions of the framed pieces being 51” X 41." 

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Rothermel's abstract and landscape paintings are included in many private, corporate, and public collections. His work is represented in galleries in Scottsdale, Aspen, Boulder, Baltimore, Chevy Chase and in his gallery in Santa Fe. Recently two of David's watercolor landscapes were added to the internationally recognized permanent collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine.

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"Long before my journey as an artist, I have always been enamored with nature and the landscape. I spent most of my early years in the woods, streams and fields of Pennsylvania, hunting, fishing, and camping. I have always revered the land as my spiritual feed and escape.

 

"As an art student, I was trained in the formal aspects of painting and drawing as well as the traditional techniques of transparency and opacity. As time passed it became my method of painting in oil and canvas. As an artist, being in the southwest desert, I could see how the subtle nature of light and space could only be accomplished with this technique. I preferred to call it 'suspended transparencies.'

 

"The painting, 'Organ Mountains Triptych' is a mature version of the applications learned many years ago. This painting of the Organ Mountains reflects the jagged edges and the rugged, solid range at the same time being surrounded by floating clouds, giving the viewer not only a feeling of structure but the lyrical atmospheric desert light. The luminosity comes from the layering of transparent cool reds and warm blues overlaid with strokes of opaque paint to give the surface a visual variety and a spatial effect. The Organ Mountains have always been a very special place for me, having lived in Las Cruces for many years. They are a visual anchor, constantly changing as the sun shifts from east to west. The magic moment would always happen as the sun would go down; radiating its rugged yet subtle presence on me. This is the time of day from which my inspiration comes, as referenced in this six-by-fifteen-foot work of art submitted by me, the artist, David Rothermel."

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