David Wells Roth

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Paintings from New York, 1980-1982

Paintings from France, 1982-1993

Bio

Background information

In 1979, after studying painting at Boston University, Roth began painting cityscapes having been influenced by his love of architecture, the art of the French impressionists and American masters such as Edward Hopper, Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn.

In Spring of 1980, he moved to New York City where, despite the financial hardships of being a fledgling artist in New York (which included living in his car for a time), he painted throughout the city.  For two years he captured views of Central Park and street scenes, occasionally selling them to passersby.

In 1982 a man from France visited Roth’s Greenwich Village basement studio (a storage space where he lived and worked) to see some of his paintings. He offered Roth the opportunity to live in his home with his family in the South of France for several months in exchange for one of the paintings.  Four months later Roth brought the painting to France and stayed with his first patron and his family.  After a summer of painting in Provence, and further bartering paintings for lodging, he moved to the Paris suburb of Le Pre St. Gervais and lived in apartments owned by other members of that family for the next 15 years.
 
While living in Paris, he traveled throughout France, Italy and England, continuing to paint city life, people, and landscapes of Europe. During that time, those paintings were shown in several solo exhibitions in France and the U.S. including numerous shows in the French Library of Boston, the Copley Society of Boston, and several group exhibitions including the Grand Palais of Paris.  

After returning to the U.S., he went on to explore these themes.  Presently Roth is living in Massachusetts where he paints in his studio.

In 2007 he was chosen by Chief Judge, Hon. José Antonio Fusté of Puerto Rico, after seeing Roth's portrait of the Boston Federal Judge, Hon. Richard Stearns, to undertake a three-year, first-of-its-kind project: to paint the portraits of all thirty-one federal judges in Puerto Rico from 1899 to the present.  The portraits were completed in March of 2010.

Currently his work is showing in The Allan Stone Gallery and The Julie Heller Gallery in New York and Massachusetts.