Day 202- Wallace Whitney- Witness to Gesture

It’s Day 202 and I just had a lovely lunch with my good friend Julianne, who’s an art teacher!  Then I went on a long dog walk and then finished my painting.  There was a lot of waiting for paint to dry moments today.  I had a good time paying tribute to today’s artist.  Join me in honoring Wallace Whitney today.  Biography and paintings are from the Horton Gallery’s website.

Wallace Whitney (b. 1969, Boston, MA) lives and works in the Bronx, NY. He received a MFA from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY and a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

Additionally, Whitney is a co-founder of the pioneering CANADA gallery in the Lower East Side.

The artist is represented by Horton Gallery, where he has been featured in a solo show, a group show, an art fair, and a solo presentation at The Armory Show, New York, and Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg, FR. The artist was featured in a two-person presentation with James Hyde at the NADA Art Fair, Miami in 2013.

 

 

 

 

The unmediated and improvisational quality in Wallace Whitney’s paintings likens each of them to scientific residue or psychic mementos. They serve as witnesses to the gesture, evidence of the body, and as a reaffirmation of the intrinsic materiality of painting.

Whitney has inherited a strong gestural sense from artists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, yet his disarming, discordant use of color, line, and pictorial depth are evocative of Hans Hofmann or Philip Guston.

The artist’s sensitivity to his immediate surroundings and landscape root the works in the

moment; from the wash of LaGuardia jet traffic in the sky to the defiantly scarred street trees, flocks of noisy feral parrots, and the outcrops of Bronx bedrock coated in spray paint, Whitney folds these fragments from daily life into formally rich and poetically generous abstract pictures.

 

~

I feel like I could’ve used more white paint and more strokes with my piece.  Well, I liked how it turned out and I’m noticing that I’m always finding more ways I could’ve made the piece better.  I just have to make sure I know that I succeeded by merely doing it.  I hope you enjoy my tribute piece today and I’ll see you tomorrow on Day 203!

Best,

Linda