Twisted Elm, 2005, 36” x 60”, Oil on Canvas, Collection of 15 Central Park West
Oxbow (Early Morning), 1997/98, 87” x 98”, Oil on Canvas
Treetops, Oil on Canvas, 72” x 96”, Grand Rapids Art Museum Collection.
March, 2004, Oil on thirty one canvases, 70" X 116"
March (Detail)
Artforum, Feb 2003, James Yood Whitehouse employs a rather taut paint handling reminiscent at times of the pale, summery Impressionism of early Alfred Sisley, or of the landscapes of William Merritt Chase. His brushstrokes accrete patiently and unobtrusively, seemingly in accord with the scene he represents, reinforcing an air of equanimity and calm. His composition, too, with its tendency toward classical construction-framing elements, ease of access, parity of light and dark, etc.-presents the landscape as a realm of balance and logic. Whitehouse`s activity, like the scenes he represents, seems almost outside time, indifferent to the fashions of art or the vagaries of the contemporary. Like nature, this work abides, and its pertinence resides in the inexhaustible relevance of its fundamental aspiration: to try to find again in the surrounding world a harmony that passes understanding, a manner of thinking of nature as meta- and paraphysical home. - James Yood
Margaret Hawkins
Chicago Sun-Times
Whitehouse is trying to record not not an idea or even a sight but the whole experience of being in nature. To do that he often sets up his easel in the middle of a stream or on the edge of a cliff to get just the right view. More than once he has painted through a Scottish downpour. The result is paintings that capture a sense of not any one place so much as a universal space, a web of natural surroundings composed of mist and water and snow and the occasional outcropping of foliage and greenery.
Polly Ullrich, New Art Examiner Whitehouse can be placed within the venerable British Landscape tradition in painting but his brilliant, lapidary, and monumental (some are ten feet wide) landscapes are not advertisements for old-fashioned ocularism. His ambition - as he has reiterated in statements and lectures - is no less than to reproduce the ontology, or the roots, of human perception itself. Bolstered by new research that suggests that certain aspects of human perception are universal - that all people tend to "see" the same thing because their nervous systems are organized in the same way - Whitehouse has set out in his paintings to capture what he thinks might be shared perceptual experience. He wants us to see what he sees, literally. He doesn't just want the impressionistic play of light on a tree, he wants the reality of the tree too."