Dennis Wojtkiewicz Was born 1956, Chicago, Illinois. Hes am American Hyper realist and draughtsman. He graduated from Southern Illinois University and he is associated with the Hyper realist movement. He is most famous for his oversized pieces of work of sliced fruit and flowers and to create those pieces he uses traditional oil paints and brushes, he also uses pastels for when he draws.
Most of his paintings are on a large scale and are mostly of still life and fruit which has been sliced in half or into very thin slices so light can be seen shining through them making them translucent. The paintings are incredibly realistic and its actually hard for me to believe that an artist could create something that looks so amazing.
“Each painting is constructed by beginning with a monochrome underpainting in the complement of the featured subject. Subsequent layers of semi-opaque through to transparent colors follow with up to ten passes before the end result is achieved.” -Dennis Wojkiewicz
Line is a key factor in his work as he is a hyper realist he tends to paint each individual line to maximum detail, for example, in the first image below you don’t have to struggle to make out each vein that is running through the slice of fruit, the way that all the veins and lines build up makes the whole thing very structural and geometric which is the same for a lot of his other pieces of art.
Wojkiewicz work is also highly reliant on colours and value. The colours that he uses for most of his paintings make me feel relaxed, happy and positive. The colours are very warm colours which is why they the paintings feel so positive to me, they’re also bright in a lot of the paintings but in a few they are quite cold colours which made the painting seem mysterious and dead like in the last two images. but for all of his paintings they are translucent which make the whole painting light up and gives the piece of fruit a contrast between it and the background which is usually a darker blue or black.
The way he paints also gives a very nice texture to the fruit. The image of the strawberry below has a very nice texture to it, when i think of a fruit cut in half i imagine it would be sticky but the way Wojkiewicz paints them, makes look like they’ve been cut through extremely smooth and perfect, because of this they also have a dry but juicy feel to them. but they look In the strawberry image he uses the light perfectly to make the strawberry light up an really stand out against its dark background but to me it still feels dry.
Its these two paintings that are above and below that are different from the other two because they are much more dead like and negative. They feel this way because of the colours and the way he uses lines the make the veins look withered. The colors he usually uses are usually bright and lively but with these two paintings the colours that he uses are quite dull and darker tones of what he normally uses. When i look into detail of these two paintings, especially the bottom one, the veins remind me of actual veins like in a human, and this idea starts to make the paintings very much alive.
To me his work is about making something that is “everday” and simple into some thing that is actually quite complicated, intricate and beautiful just by looking at it with a different light which is amazing that he has managed to do this. But to Dennis Wojkiewicz his work can
“function as metaphor or representation of themes such as spirituality, relationships (or lack thereof), reproduction and, generally speaking, the transitory nature of most stuff.”
Robert Pye 
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