BRATTLEBORO-Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts, 181–183 Main St., pays tribute to longtime Putney artist David Rohn, with “Retrospective,” a gallery-wide exhibition, opening Friday, April 3, from 5 to 7 p.m. and continuing through June 7.
A “Directors’ Talk” is scheduled for Saturday, May 2, at 5 p.m. Many of the artist’s paintings will be on view for the first time.
Rohn (1934–2025) died at his home Dec. 10. He was a teacher, humorist, lover of music and poetry; he has been represented by Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts for a decade.
Author Vincent Panella, a close friend of Rohn, writes that he “attended a military high school, flew airplanes, rode jumping horses, put on puppet shows, built a mini-home for his daughter Cleo down to the chairs and pots and pans, had sailed around the Greek Islands, owned a New York loft, taught art in many places, and settled in Vermont.
“David was a good storyteller, but you didn’t want to interrupt him mid-narrative. He was driven and singular, he drove fast, was undeterred by age or physical inconvenience, had many friends, a loving and extended family, and he never missed an opportunity to hear music, or lectures, to look at art about which he knew so much.”
Rohn lived a simple existence close to the earth and the ordinary objects that informed his paintings. Bach, Beethoven, and his hand-puppet companion Miss Tulip were as important to this visual artist as Cézanne and Matisse.
Putney artist Nancy Storrow remembers living in France in 1970. “At the time, David was painting large abstractions, using oil paints. He worked in an unheated back space as a studio, where we also kept escargots. Occasionally the snails escaped and ate his sketches.”
As Rohn painted throughout the ’60s, he said he considered himself “a serious professional intending to advance American Art, and I hoped to awe the art world with my painting, [but] I had to find a better process regardless of the product. I changed to watercolor paper and began drawing, then painting the objects that began accumulating on my windowsills and counters at home. I painted in the penciled outlines with watercolor, and as I worked I was looking at abstract arrangements in the overlapping puddles that have their own flow and assertions.”
As long as he could paint, he was content — as evidenced by multiple stacks of unsigned, unframed paintings, many with images painted on both sides. He found pleasure in the act of painting, not artistic invention, and remarked that it was watercolor which gave him “freedom and liberation from an art world of expectation and judgment.”
As a guest on Wendy O’Connell’s BCTV program, Here We Are, Rohn explained: “It’s very much about the process and what I’ve been thinking about recently. I know there’s a clue, I mean at what I suppose is towards the end of a long life of just looking at things ... looking at still lifes. It’s a very interesting, intense situation for a human being to be just keeping company with a still life. There’s something in that process that is much more important than the result. You know the result comes out of the process.”
“The more tangible result — David Rohn’s legacy — is our great good fortune,” wrote organizers in a news release, “a life’s work of insightful, sensitive, masterfully rendered paintings.”
However, as his longtime Guilford friend, Margie Serkin, observes, “His artistic achievements have been formidable and are well documented, but it is just as much his offering of friendship in the quietest, unfailingly supportive way which shines on. David could be stirred to passionate resistance in the face of injustice but never allowed himself to fall into pessimism, and shared freely his hopes and his enduring belief in a brighter future for us all.”
For more information about this exhibit, visit mitchellgiddingsfinearts.com or call 802-251-8290.
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