Maryland Heights artist Mark Witzling’s Intellectual Rigor immediately strikes the eye with its chromatic juxtaposition.
Created last year, that 4-foot-square painting – in oils and mixed media on a wooden panel – balances largely ashen vertical swathes on its left three quarters or so with a scorching column of reds and oranges down its right side.
With its grays recalling clay-heavy loam and the remainder of the painting almost ablaze, Intellectual Rigor suggests a clash of elemental proportions, earth versus fire. Coincidentally, the painting’s creation did involve a dualistic afflatus, Witzling relates, albeit not one involving classical Greece.