(An Appropriate Distance)

 

FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP

Dec 03, 2019 2:57 PM EST

On a visit to Vienna in 1995, my friend the painter Gottfried Mairwöger (1951-2003) took me to the Church where Bruckner had been organist, not to listen to the organ but to lie on the pews and look up at the ceiling frescos. He was a friend of Dzubas and knew how much he admired the Austro/ Hungarian Baroque painter, Franz Anton Maulpertsch who had made them. Coming later than Tiepolo and Pozzo, he was much freer and physical with his brush technique than they were.
Fresco is made one square metre at a time before the damp plaster sets and Dzubas used Magna paint thinned with turpentine on damp canvas. This enabled him to bleed and blend his colour areas into each other, similar to the Baroque fresco painters who avoided hard delineation of their forms.
Dzubas' little known admiration of this Old Master is an exiting aspect of his art, which furthers "American type painting" by this berlin born American painter who exhibited in Germany and vistied middle Europe all his life.
David Evison Berlin den 3.12.19

- David Evison