Dan Witz (born 1957) is a Brooklyn, NY based street artist and realist painter. He grew up in Chicago, IL, and graduated in 1981 from Cooper Union, on New York City’s Lower East Side. Witz, consistently active since the late 1970s, is one of the pioneers of the street art movement. Dan Witz has had one of the most sustained careers of any street artist. He is perhaps known best for his witty, trompe l’oeil stickers and silkscreen paste-up posters, such as “Holes” (1996-99), a series of pieces he pasted around Brooklyn that suggested holes in their respective surfaces. In recent years Witz has turned to painting, mining the city of New York for inspiration and combining traditional and digital tools in his intensive processes. He begins with digital photographs, edits them in Photoshop, and then prints the images onto canvas as achromatic underpaintings. Like the Dutch masters, Witz then applies colour with traditional glazing techniques, allowing him to create illusions of depth, form, light, and shadow, as in Big Mosh Pit (2007), for which he drew on his experiences as a musician in the 1980s for subject matter. Dan Witz’s paintings have been shown in galleries throughout the US and Europe.
~ Paddle8
