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ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Wooters paints manly still life. His models are tools, hardware, and packing materials; although he considers subject matter irrelevant. Wooters cites as his example the appreciation of portraits and illustrations of unfamiliar people and symbols. It is the faithfulness of a painting, and not its meaning, that Wooters claims stir the soul. To this end, he suppresses self-expression to overcome thoughtless mannerism and falsity of style, in the attempt to make every stroke match the visual truths of his models. Wooters believes that depictive art in its highest and purest form retains little evidence of the maker's identity.

Wooters insists that a painting has the ability to reveal what cannot be expressed in words. Its beauty transcends both concept and narrative. A truly universal art needs no interpretation. As such, the objects selected by the artist are without symbolic intent, though they are familiar and readily available to him.

Wooters constructs his paintings according to the principles of depictive art formalized by the Australian artist, Max Meldrum. In this tradition, painting is an observational science that consists of nothing more than accurately re-presenting three-dimensional reality on two-dimensional surfaces by recording the tone, proportion, and hue of visual experience.
In contrast to the indiscriminate selection of visual qualities from snap-shot photography and high-resolution digital imagining, the economy and restraint of Wooters' technique connects people across time and space by showing only what is human in what is seen.