Scrabble Boards, Typewriters, Dogs and Descendants

About

FIRST STREET GALLERY is pleased to announce Diane Fitch’s debut First Street solo exhibition, SCRABBLE BOARDS, TYPEWRITERS, DOGS AND DESCENDANTS, opening on October 2nd, and running through October 26 th , 2024. Her oil paintings and graphite drawings, sourced in the interior spaces of her home, combine still life objects and lived in spaces to create complex works that beckon the viewer to enter.

Fitch’s paintings and drawings intermingle intentionally arranged and collected objects with the random settings of everyday life, often inhabited by family members. The critic Julia Purdy writes, “While persistent clutter defies our best attempts to organize and cull, Fitch sees something much different: lines and spaces, enclosures and openings in everyday rooms, the geometry of furnishings and objects. Her paintings hint not only that these settings have a life of their own, but that the humans that inhabit them participate in the same fabric of existence. Strangers to us, Fitch’s friends and family may work and play in these rooms, but glowing colors, organic shapes and contrasting textures invite the viewer to share in the intimacy of a home, like slipping on a borrowed sweater. The result is not merely an environment for living in but a living environment, in which objects shift, appear, disappear, reappear somewhere else from canvas to canvas. Each setting is dynamic…”

The exhibition also includes a series of purely still life paintings, some envisioning a Lilliputian world, small landscapes of houses with objects that feel inherently animated, stand-ins for the human figure. Visual quotations of master paintings provide a key to interpretation.

Fitch works from direct observation: she notes “the meagerness of the photograph as a sole source of painting imagery … The human gaze is very different than how a camera sees. When we binocular-visioned humans deeply look, we scan a space, looking up, down and around.” This concern with physical point of view creates a dynamism of space and location in the work.

The process of reassessing, redrawing and improvisation goes on throughout the making of a painting, sometimes becoming buried beneath the final resolution. Fitch’s goal is to keep the evidence of the search more visible and to respond to what occurs along the way.

Diane Fitch’s work has been exhibited throughout the US and is included in public and private collections.

To see more work by the artist:
www.firststreetgallery.org/artists/diane-fitch/
www.dianefitch.com

Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 11am – 6 pm