Dennis Wojtkiewicz [voit-KEV-itch], currently retired, was a full professor at Bowling Green State University where he taught painting and drawing in the School of Art since 1988. He received his M.F.A. degree from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1981 and also studied at the Atelier Neo-Medici in France under the direction of Patrick Betaudier in 1978 and 1983.

In this most recent solo exhibition, from September 12 - November 1, the artist explores his process and the nature of realism in his current artist statement:

In our digital age, what is the value of a painting painstakingly constructed over time when anyone can capture an image instantly with a phone? I believe the answer lies not solely in the artifact but in the process. Like Tibetan monks creating impermanent sand mandalas, the act of slow, careful construction embodies the art itself. Time becomes material—layered into the surface as surely as pigment—and the act of looking becomes an act of meditation.

This body of work explores how light interacts with natural forms that exist at the boundary of biology and sensuality. The lushness of sliced fruit, glistening with juice, echoes bodily appetites; the unfurling of flowers recalls both reproductive necessity and sensual display. Drawing upon the vanitas tradition, these radiant but fleeting subjects embody biology's cycles of birth and dissolution, desire and mortality.

Through intimate, close-up viewpoints, I liberate these forms from mere depiction, pressing them toward abstraction—toward rhythm, pattern, and texture. The paintings ask viewers to engage them not just as signs pointing to recognizable objects but as vivid, sensual encounters accountable only to their own internal logic.

Ultimately, my work is about attention and presence, reimagining biology's fleeting moments of beauty as luminous icons that celebrate the act of looking itself—the possibility of finding, again and again, that moment where craft, vision, and wonder converge.

The artist’s work has been shown at international art fairs in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Palm Beach, Santa Fe, Taipei and Toronto. He is the recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Individual Fellowships and has both paintings and drawings represented in major public, private and corporate collections in the North America, Europe and Asia.