

Abstractions in Nature



Titus Welliver’s second solo show at Frank Pictures Gallery, Abstractions In Nature, features landscapes in the artist’s spare, stark style. The son of the late Neil Welliver (1929-2005), the dean of American landscape painters, Titus was similarly influenced by the brutal rhythm of the northern New England woodlands, yet his moonlight-shot vision is assuredly his own. On one level his paintings have the flat simplicity of Japanese woodcuts or coloring books; yet on closer examination they contain the density and energy of abstract works of unrelenting power.

Titus Welliver began his formal training as a painter with his father at the age of fourteen and continued at Bennington where he studied painting with Pat Ford and Philip Wofford. Five years later, he abandoned painting for a career as an actor. Welliver's lengthy resume in film, television, and theatre includes roles in Gone Baby Gone, JFK, The Doors, and as Silas Adams on HBO's Deadwood.

“In 1999, I was in Maine for a hiatus from a television series and decided to start painting again," says Welliver of his return, “I had not picked a brush in over 20 years and after several paintings considered putting the brush back down, but I just toughed it out. I am not a plein air painter. I choose to look, absorb, and then translate that idea from what I have seen. My paintings are not and never have been strictly representational. They share certain aesthetic qualities of abstract expressionism. The personal success of my paintings occurs when the visceral experience of that moment in nature has been captured."



Besides his show at Frank Pictures Titus has shown at the 10 High Street gallery in Camden Maine, the exhibition "Water" at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport and Susan Maasch Fine Art in Portland.

