Dirty Rat Collage

San Francisco Bay Area Artist David Hewitt sets out to create work with the same gritty feel and energy found in the city streets. Although he often begins a new piece with a specific object or color palette in mind, his work evolves freely through a process of building up and stripping away multiple layers, giving his work a distinct weathered look. David has long been influenced by the deteriorating landscapes of metropolitan cities - the weathered buildings, peeling walls of paint, and graffiti create an interesting blend of layers and textures which provide David with his initial concepts and inspiration. Early in his self-taught career, David painted primarily with oils, but his work quickly evolved to include salvaged materials such as wood, metal, fabric, and anything interesting enough to put in a painting. Over time, painting became constructing and David realized that "building" a painting was creatively more satisfying. With his most recent work, the Urban Collage Series, David continues the urban decay theme but with a heavy emphasis on the use of paper sourced from the streets. More than just arranging worn bits of paper, David’s complex work incorporates paint, pencil, imagery, and other materials creating a dense composition of color and texture. With the shift from paint to paper, David is now able to layout a stream of ideas that can be worked through and modified before making them permanent. The artist has also developed techniques to manipulate the paper in ways he finds mimic paint, all the while, focusing on his strength of composition. David enjoys the flexibility that paper offers and values its added benefit of text, color, image, and texture that lends itself to his stylistic work. Each piece in this series is finished in acrylic resin, which, not only adds a more polished look, but creates added depth by saturating the paper and drawing out ghostly images, color, and text from the lower layers of paper. Follow David online and stay connected for the latest events and studio updates: Connect: Website: