Interview with Curator Phaedra Siebert
Ben Whitehouse talks about his painting and
the evolution of The Revolution Series
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio
March 15 - April 25
Revolution Still Lifes
ArtChicago
April 30 - May 3
Perimeter Gallery, Booth TBA
Grand Rapids Art Museum
June 4 - August 22
GRAM and Ox-Bow
Perimeter Gallery, Chicago September 10 - October 9
Professor of Art Theory & Criticism
Northwestern University, Evanston
 Still Morning | 69" x 95" | Oil on Canvas |
With only a handful of months left to go, there can't be too much doubt that the 20th Century was the worst period for landscape painting since the Renaissance. Something went wrong this century, some fundamental connection between painter and nature appears largely to have broken. It may have been the relentless urbanization of life that caused this disenfranchisement, or changes in artistic strategies that encouraged artists to turn inward for inspiration rather than outward. Whatever the Source of this shift in thinking, the idea that a painter should look carefully, ponder, and then optically respond to an actual site in nature has been less than common practice for many years, and is no small part of the reason why we should therefore treasure Ben Whitehouse's recent endeavors.
For, those last named things are precisely what Whitehouse does. He travels in search of material, seeking just that spot, just that bend in the river, the turn of the path, the rise of a road, just that quality of light and space and mood that will satisfy his desire for content and composition. He makes small oil sketches on site, outdoors, and then back in his studio develops and extrapolates those sketches into quite large paintings that make bursts of identification with nature into something monumental and satisfying. Whitehouse is drawn to watered and sylvan glades where people are conspicuous by their absence, places that have their most palpable human connection in their previous colonization in the history of art.
For Ben Whitehouse is very much an artist engaged in an overt dialogue with some traditions of landscape painting. His ruminations on that legacy, particularly on the French Impressionism of artists such as Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley during the late 1870's and 1880's, is clearly indicated. While Whitehouse works at a scale those artists never attempted at that time, he shares with them the belief that, among other things, the urban modern soul can be refreshed with an immersion into nature, that nature can provide a foil - perhaps an escapist one - for the pressures of life, that landscape can become a new Arcadia, creating a site for the unburdening of self.
Whitehouse's work provides the victory of surrender, achieving across its dappled surfaces something so basic to the human spirit as to have satisfied the consciousness of humankind for centuries. Beauty, harmony, judiciousness, balance, modesty, order - hardly the buzzwords of much of contemporary art - are investigated in these paintings, rooted in an almost metaphysical identification of nature as a repository of peace. Water, land and sky are posed for maximum effect, inviting our reverie; a reminder that, after all, nature will abide. Yet this is never lavish imitation; Whitehouse's myriad of decisions as to horizontal line, color saturation, adjustment of elements, and overall pictorial coordination can too easily be overlooked in its immersion into what appears an inevitable calmness. That it is no such thing, actually the result of a relentless thinking and probing eye and hand, makes it at the end of the day an achievement of human nature.