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
SUNDAY, AUGUST 19, 2007
By Christopher Yasiejko
Ben Whitehouse has spent his artistic life devoted to the method of painting known as en plein air, French for “in the open air.”
The appeal of the experience is basic: Painting while outdoors allows the artist to study and recreate scenes as natural light affects them. One challenge is that the Earth tends to continue spinning, and the light changes with it.
Monet, whose plein-air work has influenced greatly Whitehouse’s perspective, would paint a scene as it appeared in one moment, wait an hour and paint the scene again. Whitehouse, a 45-year-old from Great Britain who now lives in the Chicago area, always has wondered about the moments in between. Aren’t they equally important?
So Whitehouse, known for painting landscapes at scales of 10 to 12 feet wide by 6 to 7 feet tall (“to honor,” he says, “the great scale of natural landscapes”), spent the past three years inventing ways of incorporating those moment-to-moment shifts into his paintings.
The results are on display in the two DuPont Galleries at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts through Jan. 6. “Revolution” is a large-scale project in two ways: It attempts to capture the essence of light in one area during a period of time—24 hours with three of its pieces and one month with a fourth—and it is physically expansive, a rare two-gallery solo show at the DCCA that includes two collections of paintings, two digital installations and a fifth piece that is his response to the attacks of Sept. 11.
One work, “Watch over Central Park,” comprises 48 plein-air panels painted in New York City’s Central Park during a 24-hour period. Whitehouse chose a spot in the park and brought enough water and eggplant sandwiches to sustain him for a day. He looked to the eastern sky and found a patch that he could revisit throughout the day, having framed the view within the interstice between two branches of a nearby tree. He did the same with a patch of the western sky.
The other collection, “March,” arranges as in a calendar 31 11-by-14-inch plein-air canvases. Each depicts what he saw on a morning in March 2004, when he awoke each day and observed at the same time the same view of Lake Michigan, which is a block from his former studio. Every canvas is different, some more than others, with a surprising variance in the colors of the lake and sky.
The digital pieces, called “Revolution Northbar Lake” and “Revolution Central Park,” are seamless, 24-hour high-definition videos whose unique process of creation led Whitehouse to apply for a patent. They recorded every movement and shift of light in one location and are meant to be viewed in real time. At the DCCA, each video plays on a 65-inch Panasonic plasma monitor.
“The big story about that kind of experience,” Whitehouse says of plein-air painting, “is the fleeting and transitional quality of natural phenomena. Despite the Impressionistic experiment, you’re fundamentally stuck with the problem that painting is a frozen experience. I was always interested in catching a particular moment and extending it into eternity through painting—you can sustain this note forever.”
Also in the exhibition is “September,” a 56-by-69-inch landscape painted in the American heartland, one of Whitehouse’s most cherished muses. The upper two-thirds are of the sky, dominated by dark and smoky clouds; the bottom third depicts a tranquil field with trees on the distant horizon. Those two parts of the painting are on separate, oddly shaped canvases—a narrow, triangular wedge of empty space divides them.
“Heaven and earth,” Whitehouse says, “were being torn apart.”
Through Jan. 6. DCCA, 200 S. Madison St., Wilmington. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 12-5 p.m. Wednesdays and Sundays. $5, students and 65 and older $3, 11 and younger free. Saturdays free until 1 p.m. 656-6466, www.thedcca.org