WAUPUN — The Waupun Fine Arts Committee hosted a reception last week for Beaver Dam painter Frank Mittelstadt at the Waupun Public Library.
The Fine Arts Committee has set up galleries for art in the upstairs west side of the library for several years, but had put them on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mittelstadt’s gallery, which was set up on March 1, is the first gallery opened in four years.
The paintings mostly center around nature scenes and portraits of regional wildlife. This includes works depicting birds, bears, elk, and wolves. On display were a variety of his paintings and prints.
“My paintings are really pretty grassroots, they’re really just expressions of things I’ve experienced and what I really love,” Mittelstadt said. “I just go out and photograph the wild and nature and do a lot of camping and hiking. I try to paint as honestly, as detailed, and as realistically as I can.”
Mittelstadt went on to describe his process for creating the paintings, which included going to remote camping locations to take pictures of wide open landscapes.
“I really stress over my compositions,” he said. “When I do my paintings I spend a lot of time at the computer digging through my photos, picking things out of each one that I want and just playing and composing things on the computer before I ever start to lay it out on a board and start painting it.”
According to Mittelstadt, he has been painting since he was in school, where one day he picked up a paint brush he knew that he would do that for the rest of his life. The oldest painting he has was dated to 1971, and he’s been painting professionally since 1984—a total of 40 years.
“I have never taken a lesson in painting or read a book on painting or anything, I’ve really just developed it over the years by myself,” Mittelstadt said. “So I guess one from that aspect, anybody could do it. Really painting is so much more in the eye than it is anything else. You got to be able to look at what you’ve done and say that’s wrong and fix it, you know, it’s more of that than anything else.”
The reception was attended by officers of the Fine Arts Committee, Mayor of Waupun Rohn Bishop, and members of the public. The gallery can be found in the upstairs adult fiction area and will remain up until April 24. Pieces are available for purchase, inquiries can be brought to the library front desk.
