Narrative figurative oilEstate

Sandra Wittow

Denver, Colorado

Narrative oil paintings where folklore, faith, and the figure meet.

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About

Sandra Wittow (1935–2011) was a Denver-based oil painter and the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. Working on hand-stretched, hand-sized linen canvas, she described herself as a "narrative, metaphoric and figure artist." A Cornell BFA graduate and University of Colorado MFA, her paintings explored universal truths through fairy tale, biblical narrative, and personal mythology. Her solo show Disenchantment at the Denver Art Museum, her retrospective The Rose and the Briar at the Mizel Arts & Culture Center at the JCC, and ten permanent paintings under Colorado's Art in Public Places program mark her legacy. Her 2013 memoir Thicker Than Paint: A Lifework contains over 100 reproductions of her paintings.

In their words

“I work from the place where private experience becomes universal — where a fairy tale is also a biography, and a figure in a painting is both no one and everyone.”