DAVID ROHN
Retrospective
April 3 – June 7, 2026
“On Supervising a Puddle”
Director’s Talk
Saturday, May 2, 5pm
Everyone is invited to an informal gallery conversation about the life and paintings of Putney artist David Rohn. Share your stories and memories and enjoy his gallery-wide retrospective exhibition of over 50 watercolors, oils and prints. Rohn, who died in December 2025, was a painter first and foremost, but he also loved teaching, traveling, cooking, reading, playing music, and enjoying time with family and friends.
Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts gave its first 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 approach to 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 him 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 this—as 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, and geometries.” We dearly miss this extraordinary artist and friend.
~ Petria Mitchell and Jim Giddings
DAVID ROHN | Retrospective
Teacup with Reflection, 2002, watercolor
“Rohn’s paintings seem part of another diction altogether, one free of jargon and its thin gratifications; free, also, of art-schooled ambition to please teacher/critic/dealer, but rarely the eye of the beholder. The eye of this beholder is soothed and delighted, reminded of the old sense of magic which manifests itself in art. I like to call it magic, or alchemy, since these words convey transformation: the way all true art, representational or abstract, changes the visual world into a vision of the world.”
~ Ann Lauterbach, Light Repositories: On David Rohn’s Watercolors
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“… 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
Black Vase and Orange on Print Cloth, 1985, watercolor
David Rohn 1934-2025
“In the early 1970s I had been an abstract artist for over a decade … 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 made a switch from being active and scheming to make a great painting, to being passive and just receiving the motif … 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.
Knowing when a piece is finished never happens on the first day. Seeing is complicated, it takes a long time to settle in. Supervising a puddle takes all of your attention. I have a lot of respect for what I do unconsciously.”
~David Rohn
Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts curates a diverse collection of innovative works that stimulate the seasoned collector and aesthetic explorer.