Country Chic

“Emma did an amazing job with this piece. Looking at the two beautiful pieces of art brings the scope of the outdoors into my indoors. And then the detail of the little barn really broadens the expanse of the sky. It’s just the perfect piece.”
— Lynn

Recovered barn doors painted with a modern country aesthetic.

My co-worker Lynn, who is also an artist (a professional quilter among many other talents), approached me with a vision for an artwork. She had found a set of barn doors, sanded them, and painted them white. She envisioned a painting with a cloudy sky and a classic red barn to match her country farmhouse aesthetic. I was intrigued by the opportunity to paint evocative scenery on an unusual surface.

I pictured a rainy day in western Maryland, where the air and ground are saturated with water. I create a few versions. The result was the artwork below: massive cumulous clouds against a cerulean sky.

The grass has bright patches, indicating that the sunlight is penetrating through the clouds.

I painted the barn with a lot of detail, so that you would feel compelled to come closer to the painting. The barn also gives the composition a sense of scale.

Voilà! The artwork was installed in the hallway.

A Note on John Constable

When I think of clouds, I can’t help but think of John Constable’s paintings of clouds from the early 1820s. John Constable (b. 1776 - d. 1837) was a Romantic painter known for his quintessentially English landscape paintings (Constable notoriously never once left the country). I was around nineteen when I saw my first Constables in person at the National Gallery of Art in London. At the time I was working as an apprentice to an oil painter in Lincolnshire (a story for another time, but you can see his art here if you’re curious: James Gillick). In the National Gallery there was a small exhibit tucked away with ten or so Constable paintings only about seven or eight inches wide. I was struck by their beauty and the way I connected emotionally with them.

Constable captured clouds under all manner of conditions. He labeled almost all of his paintings with scientific precision, indicating the date, time, wind, and weather conditions. The result was a great variety of clouds in different seasons, evoking various moods, all with subtle texture and temperature contrasts.

Take the painting below. At first glance it appears to be a neutral, gray sky. Unless you really like paintings of clouds, you might just walk right by it in a museum. However, with some slow looking you may detect a subtle interplay of warm and cool, with hints of blue and magenta. The longer you look at this painting, the more colors you see.

In 1928, Constable's wife died. Most of the landscapes from that period onward feature dark, brooding clouds.

Painting clouds is difficult. The subject is ephemeral and fickle. But in paintings of clouds, we can find a reflection of our emotions. There is a sky for every feeling.

It's a Ruff Life

I started bringing Ruthie to Bark Social about two months ago. She has the time of her life playing with the other dogs there, and I can relax and read my book or socialize with friends. The trainers there are very attentive to all of the dogs and they love my Ruthie.

The place has become very special to me, so when I proposed the idea to do a pop-up with my art on May 19th, I knew I needed to make a piece especially for the occasion.

Gaby, one of Ruthie’s favorite Bark Social trainers!

I started by taking a bunch of photos and brainstorming about what kind of art I should make. What stood out to me is how the dogs run the place!

Then I stumbled across this artwork on Etsy:

It was the perfect concept! I decided I would draw the dogs sitting at one of the tables in the patio with the turf field in the background. I had to take photos from the correct vantage point to make this possible:

In the artwork, the dogs would sit at the table under the TV. I turned the table horizontally so that all the dogs would fit.

I stood awkwardly in front of the tarps to get a good view of the field. This is the image I used for my sketch of the field.

The first step was to make a sketch of the turf field and the buildings behind. Then I uploaded the sketch to Canva and used the Elements feature to add all of the dogs. Canva was the appropriate tool because it allowed me to find dogs in all the positions I wanted: running, playing, fighting, drinking, splashing, and even pooping!

I uploaded my sketch of Bark Social into Canva, where I added all of the dogs, drinks, food, etc.

Next, I printed the collage from Canva and used a lightbox to trace the image onto an 11 x 15” piece of watercolor paper. It took a little bit of finagling to space out the dogs correctly and to draw their proportions correctly.

After the drawing was complete, I used a .005 Micron pen to trace over the pencil line. I erased the pencil so the graphite wouldn’t blend into the colors.

Next, I used Copic markers to add color. Copic markers are like watercolors - they bleed a little, so they blend really nicely with each other and are vibrant in color.

The final product: It’s a Ruff Life.

I was really pleased with how bright the artwork turned out. It makes Bark Social look energetic and fun. I think it encapsulates the spirit of the place!

FREE Live Art with Emma Whitaker

May 19th 12 - 3pm

Bark Social

935 Prose Street

North Bethesda, MD 20852

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Mauve Melody

I was delighted to receive a commission from a couple who have been generous patrons of my art over the years. They envisioned an artwork for their pool house that would add brightness to the room while complementing the existing color scheme. The artwork would be in the style of my round striped landscape paintings.

This was the space we had to work with. The backsplash and washer/dryer unit are a dark navy blue. The client provided me with a sample tile of the backsplash for accurate color matching.

Golden’s Prussian Blue Hue came immediately to mind. It is a deep, opaque blue. I use Golden paints exclusively because of their high pigment content.

The first decision we needed to make was about the composition. Would it be a daytime scene or a nighttime one? Would there be a winding river through the center? To get us started, I created the 3 sketches below.

I usually make 3 sketches as a starting point. It’s enough to get a sense of where to head next. Too many options can overwhelm the viewer.

Short clip of my preparatory sketches for Mauve Melody.

We decided on the color scheme and composition at right. The colors needed to be adjusted, with a little more navy blue and mauve, and less gray. We still hadn’t decided on night or day. A few more drafts were in order.

A short video of more preparatory sketches for Mauve Melody.

We decided on this sketch. It had the just the right amount of blue, mauve, gray, and teal. It also had a nice balance of warm and cool colors. A daytime scene seemed appropriate for the pool house setting.

I was ready to get started. I borrowed a large easel from the Upper School and set it up on the patio outside my building. When it got dark, I moved inside. As I was working, several passersby stopped and watched. One gentleman came back at the end of the night to see the final product.

I titled the painting Mauve Melody.

Full 3:44 video of the painting process. I started at around 4pm and ended at 10:30pm. I love the act of painting, and when I get started I usually don’t stop until it’s finished.

The final product.

Commissions are collaborative endeavors. They involve an ongoing conversation between the artist and the patron. In the end, it feels like we’ve created something together. The project is finished when the art feels “just right.”

I’m so grateful any time I am invited to make something beautiful for someone’s home. It is such a joy to be an artist. Thank you for making it possible.

Shades of Gray (Self-Portrait after Remedios Varo)

I began my Self-Portrait after Remedios Varo in the midst of a prolific period of my artistic career. During the COVID-19 lockdown I created over a hundred round landscape paintings in which I used stripes as a vehicle to study color relationships. I began to solidify my identity as an abstract painter interested in color theory, art history, and self-portraiture. The result was the painting below, replete with art historical references and an uncanny tenor derived from looking at far too many surrealist paintings.

Emma Whitaker, Shades of Gray (Self-Portrait after Remedios Varo), 2020-23, acrylic on wood panel, 16 x 20 x 3/4.”

In the quiet of her studio, the artist is about to embark on a new painting project wearing a white robe symbolic of a fresh start. She steps forward trepidatiously onto the teal “grass,” representing the fertility of her imagination. I borrowed the pose from Remedios Varo’s 1961 painting La Llamada (The Call), in which the artist, wearing flowing robes and carrying alchemical tools, depicts herself being called to a mysterious adventure.

Remedios Varo (b.1908) was a Spanish painter who experienced political persecution in Europe and fled to Mexico, where she created evocative surrealist paintings until her death in 1963. She was influenced by a host of intellectual currents and ideas, including mysticism, psychoanalysis, animism, biology, physics, and alchemy. Remedio Varo’s paintings are non-narrative, meaning that they invite the viewer to rely on their own imagination to complete the story. Situated in architecture reminiscent of the Giotto’s late Medieval frescoes, there is a historical grounding to her work. I like to imagine that her artwork reveals a secretive group of women sorcerers that have been at work for centuries. Remedio Varo’s work gives me permission to create dreamscapes for the mind to wander and get a little lost.

Remedios Varo, La Llamada (The Call), 1961, Oil on Masonite, 42 x 31 x 1 1/2,” National Museum of Women in the Arts.

The premise behind my artwork is that all matter is made up of particles in perpetual motion. I learned about this in science class, of course, but also in Stephen Greenblatt’s 2011 book The Swerve. The book hunter Poggio Bracciolini discovers Lucretius’ ancient poem On the Nature of Things, which had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years. The De Rerum Natura was a didactic poem that asserted that matter is made up of very small material particles in eternal motion, randomly colliding and swerving in new directions. The poem was controversial because it meant that there was no need for focus on the afterlife, for gods, or for religious fear, because the body is just matter that is reconstituted after death as part of the cycle of life.

In drawing classes, artists learn that matter is shaped into geometric forms, like spheres, cylinders, cubes, cones, and pyramids, and into more free-flowing, organic forms. Forms are drawn using line and rendered three dimensional using shading. My work relies mostly on line - I essentially create a coloring page for myself. Everything is made up of the same stuff, and there is a feeling that the objects in the room could be shifted and rearranged. The marble slab leans precariously to the right as if it could melt and transform into something else. The threshold at the door of my studio is painted bright blue like water, underlining the fact that the division between indoor and outdoor is porous.

The gray slab is loosely based on the Severan marble plan, also known as the Forma Urbis Romae, a massive marble plan of Rome created under the emperor Septimius Severus between 203 and 211 CE. I liked the idea of a massive plan so detailed that it recorded even the staircases of private residences. I ended up using Piranesi’s study of the plan because of the organic forms and the negative space created in between the fragments. They forms reminded me of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting called Above the Clouds, and so I decided to remove any allusion to the original plan, and just keep the forms.

G.B. Piranesi, The Roman Antiquities T.1, plate IV – Map of Ancient Rome and Forma Urbis, 1756.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Above the Clouds, 1962-63, 36 1/8 x 48 1/4 inches, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

My Self-Portrait contains numerous tools of the art teacher, which has become an essential part of my identity as an artist. I painted the slab with different shades of gray as allusion to the grayscale, also known as the value scale. The idea behind the value scale is that if you desaturate a color, it will still have a lightness or darkness. For example, if you removed the “yellow” from a swatch of yellow paint by turning off the lights, you will have a very light square of color. Conversely, green and red are very dark colors. If you desaturate them, you will have two very dark squares of color.

The value scale.

Open your iphone camera, find the filters feature, and press “Mono.” This value scale should look the same as the one to the left.

In the Self-Portrait, the artist will paint the slab in front of her with colors that correspond to their values on the grayscale. Her paints and her paint chips, useful for studying color relationships, are accessible to her. She wears color wheel glasses, another tool that artists use for developing color environments. She has other tools of the trade as well: a laptop, notebook, and espresso for her afternoon pick me up.

In art school, I felt as though I could see more colors than ever before. As a result of constantly mixing colors I was able to discern more subtleties in temperature and hue. The irony is that I cannot see any of these beautiful colors I’ve mentioned without my glasses. So, it was important to include glasses in my self-portrait!

Detail of my afternoon snack. I still have that little yellow book. It is filled with notes about Sventura, a children’s book concept I have been working on since 2017.

Next to the slab is a triangular shape that appears to have been sliced out of the ground. The missing piece has reappeared as a piece of cake on the table next to the gray artwork. This refers to a childhood memory I had when flying over the hills in Italy; I envisioned cutting the hills with a giant knife to reveal rainbow cake inside. The act of painting connects me to pleasure, adventure, and childlike imagination.

The four clocks, set to different time periods, place the artwork in the surrealist tradition. Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory is about how memories persist, but the passage of time is inevitable. Having clocks set to different times is my defiance of the ineluctability of time. Time is something I struggle to accept.

Out the door, we see an unpeopled city street inspired by the somber cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico. Profoundly metaphysical in character, De Chirico’s paintings reflected the alienation and estrangement of post-war Italy. It seemed an appropriate choice for the COVID-19 pandemic, where on my long walks I would pass people who would step to the side and avert my gaze. A single smokestack indicates the presence of human life, but I don’t think the residents will come visit me in my studio.

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), Piazza d'Italia, 1950-55, oil on canvas, 16 x 19 7/8 in. (40.5 x 50.5 cm.).

My Self-Portrait after Remedios Varo exemplifies who I am as a painter. I treat the canvas as a place to create my own little world that makes sense to me. Just like I would want a viewer hundreds of years from now to have a direct and immediate experience of my paintings, I treat paintings from hundreds of years ago with the freshness as though they were created today. I invite ancient art to become part of my work, and in doing so I not only pay homage to the artist but I also imbue my work with a multiplicity of meanings. I continuously explore how colors interact, and I love to use rich, vibrant colors that are a feast for the eyes.

My hope is that you as the viewer can create your own meaning from my work according to your own life experience and visual history. I am curious to know what you see.