Rae Witvoet is an American expatriate living and working in Amsterdam. She considers herself primarily a painter, although she has produced a large body of work in diverse media, including three dimensional work and installation with video. She has a fine arts degree, a degree in art education and is a master’s level psychologist.

Artist Statement
“How do we invent our lives out of a limited range of possibilities and how are our lives invented for us by those in power” Sekulla

Drawing and painting remain at the center of my creative process. Found painting surfaces such as tar paper, steel or wooden doors sometimes act as a platform for the structure. My attraction to objects trouvée often lead me to incorporate everyday objects into the work.

I take a highly intuitive associative approach, in which certain themes serve as a source and a point of departure. Having come to artistic growth while living in the Midwest of the US, one body of work focuses on “decoding” popular media to produce what appears to be a sort of found visual poetry.

The concept of narcissism has been a theme throughout the work as it seemed to provide a framework to interpret what I witnessed in the middle of America during the 90’s. This largely social-political work seems prophetic now.
I am interested in how art itself is used as propaganda. Other themes include gender and ethnicity and the politicalization of religion. Symbols, dream imagery and my own poetry are important elements in my work.

My curiosity and determination to break the rules, keeps me from relying on an established confirmed signature style. Figurative and narrative elements, humor and a touch of sarcasm combine to produce work that has a raw instinctive physicality about it with layers of texture and levels of meaning.