Born in Wolf Point, Montana, August 1934. Early in life DeWitt showed a strong interest in drawing and working with horses. This experience would profoundly influence his life's work. As a teenager, he considered himself a Cowboy Artist and his focus was understandably on Western Art at that time.
That all changed when the US Army beckoned. Stationed in Germany, the young soldier was drawn into a wider, more sophisticated world of thought and art by exposure to European cultures, architecture and museums. His personal horizons quickly expanded. Word spread and DeWitt was commissioned to create a life-size battalion monument for the US Army. With the monument completed, his tour of duty ended, he returned to his home in Montana. He began to realize, after a series of part time jobs, including tending bar, police work, breaking and training horses, that his future lay in the world of fine art. He moved to Minnesota and entered the Minneapolis School of Art and Design where for three years he studied art history, abstract design and the works of Robert Motherwell, Henri Laurens, Giacomo Manzu, Franz Klein, Edward Hopper, Marino Marini, Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Marc Rothko, Jacques Lipschitz, Antoine Bourdelle to name but a few.
Armed with a more developed awareness of the arts and a more refined sense of taste, DeWitt returned to Europe in 1960, where he was invited to attend the famous Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, Holland on a full tuition scholarship. Throughout his six and a half years of study at the Academy, Dewitt participated in dozens of group exhibitions, academy sponsored excursions to Italy and France visiting museums, cathedrals and famous artist's studios. These were the years when he gained awareness that sculpture is itself a language, a language he describes as ìthe silent language of form.
His studies at the Royal Academy completed, Dewitt's transition from student to sculptor was smooth. Commissions large and small, public and private, arrived regularly during the twenty-five years he resided in Europe. Dewitt's work has been exhibited in venues across the United States and Europe, and is found today in many public and private collections.
DeWitt returned to the USA in 1984 continuing his work as a professional sculptor. In1991, Helena's Holter Museum featured his work in the largest one-man exhibition ever held in Montana entitled "The Silent Voice of Form," This exhibition presented over 150 works by DeWitt, including drawings and paintings but predominantly sculpture.
Following the Holter show, DeWitt participated in important group shows across the country, and received numerous awards, including the 1995 Gold Medal Cash Award from the National Sculpture Society in New York. The Society's Silver Medal in 1996 and Bronze Medal in the year 2000 followed.
DeWitt's fascination with three-dimensional form in sculpture including both animaland human imagery continues to this day. His approach to his work remains intense. Hands-on, Constantly fine-tuning and perfecting each piece throughout the complex casting and finishing process of bronze. This includes the final patina or coloration of the work.
Beyond superb technical craftsmanship in a medium meant to stand the test of time, artistic expression is what truly elevates each DeWitt sculpture into the realm of fine art. Because each of his sculptures captures the life force of its subject and projects the distinctive stamp of Western civilization in its entirety.
Many peers and collectors around the world consider Floyd Tennison DeWitt a true American treasure.
As renowned Dutch art critic Dr. Hans Redeker states:
"Within a great tradition of sculpture, DeWitt stands out as an innovator in that he endows all his works, including his portraits, with an inner significance that transcends by far the individuality of the subject."
Floyd DeWitt is among the most inspired, the most authentic and the most singular of the artists I have met during my career as an art critic. Singular, but without the slightest trace of trendiness or fashionable modernism, he is unshakably himself. He is the one who has liberated himself from the compulsive commercialism that contaminates so much of contemporary art today. The art of Floyd DeWitt invariably employs only the purist means of sculptural expression.
