Doreen Wittenbols

Region: West

Website: https://doreenwittenbols.com/home.html

City / State: Santa Fe, NM

 My life and work have been greatly influenced by immigrating to Canada as a child and returning to the Netherlands as an adult. Transition and change are recurrent themes in my work, evoking fugitive, vulnerable, ambivalent states. Those themes have led me to explore the shared reflective aspects of souvenir and memento mori. In New Mexico, I have produced many plein air landscapes— always in one session, in water-soluble oils, on archival paper. In my series Water-Soluble Souvenirs, these plein-air paintings reference both my medium and the fleeting moment of changing landscape threatened by global warming. They often depict a single element in nature, alluding to their vulnerability with titles such as sunburnt tree. This series is a sunnier variation on the dark, bittersweet (apocalyptic) dreamscapes of my earlier Souvenirs. Since the pandemic lockdown I started to paint subjects from my garden—or I would simply place there selections from my art work or objects from my past, as subjects to paint. My common concern is with the mutable and abiding role of memory.