DAVID ROHN
Retrospective
April 3 – June 7, 2026
Opening Reception
Friday, April 3, 5-7pm
Director’s Talk
Saturday, May 2, 5pm
Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts gave its first gallery-wide solo exhibit to David Rohn in March, 2017. The gallery was two and a half years old, and showing just one artist was a risky choice. We felt that the clarity and freshness of Rohn’s watercolors would energize and transform the space, but he gave us more. He brought insight and humor and a novel way of approaching painting. Rohn lived a simple existence close to the earth and the 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. As long as he could paint he was content—pleasure was found in the act of painting, not artistic invention, and watercolor provided Rohn the ”… freedom and liberation from an art world of expectation and judgment.” This can be found in multiple stacks of unsigned paintings, most with images on both sides. Often his chosen objects and compositions were delightfully hidden in plain sight, not demanding to be shuffled or rearranged; instead, it was he who would settle in, “… looking intently at a visual field … to organize the percept into patterns, symmetries, geometries.” We dearly miss this extraordinary artist and friend. ~Petria Mitchell and Jim Giddings
David Rohn of Putney, Vermont passed away December 10th, 2025 at age 91. A passionate artist from a young age, Rohn made a name for himself all over the world as a prolific watercolor and oil painter.
“My way of painting derives from an intense reaction against art, or art as I was practicing it in the early 1970s. I had been an abstract artist for a decade or more … and hoped to awe the art world with my painting. Then I decided that the only art process I could endure, one free from theory, was what I experienced in my beginning drawing class. I changed to watercolor paper and began drawing, then painting the objects that were accumulating on my windowsills and counters at home. As I painted in the penciled outlines with watercolor, I realized as I worked I was looking at abstract arrangements in the overlapping puddles that have their own flow and assertions. I begin by gathering in. I yield to it. I play with what I have harvested, engaging in a dialogue between the parts … sometimes a dynamic equilibrium results—a perpetually self-charging energy source. It was psychologically tranquilizing.”
“… each picture having a highly articulate—but seldom outspoken—air. Yet when David Rohn gets right down to it, his very delicacy of means yields up something deeply felt and expressed. …. Rohn finds feeling; he is a still-life painter of surprising force.” ~ Gerrit Henry, Art in America
David Rohn, clowning around at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, during the Keith Haring: Subway Drawings, exhibit, in the Spring of 2023.
Mitchell•Giddings Fine Arts offers contemporary art in a variety of media, featuring emerging and established artists.
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