Alan Artner, Chicago Tribune
The changes in the New York piece are especially beautiful, as the park’s entire South-to-North expanse is dappled by light that breaks through clouds as ambient sound wafts up from streets. Since the changes are experienced in actual time, the pieces achieved heightened intensity from having had the “real” world given a sharper focus by the frame Whitehouse put around them.
Maxine Gaiber, Executive Director, The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
Whitehouse's works are beautifully conceived and meticulously executed visual art works. They can be seen in a minute or studied for hours and they reward the viewer in direct relation to the time spent viewing them. - Maxine Gaiber, Executive Director, The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
John Brunetti, Independent Critic/Curator
It seems only natural that Whitehouse's interest in creating artworks that expand the possibilities of marking time and recording transitions via the plein air experience would lead him to his most ground-breaking new body of work - Revolution - a series of state-of-the-art twenty four hour single shot HD videos that record every movement, every shift of light that occurs in the composition for an entire twenty four hour period - one revolution of the earth. The Revolution Series was conceived in December of 2002 as a means of recording the fleeting moments of an entire day through twenty four hour seamless digital 'paintings'. Compositions unfold before the viewer as incremental changes of light and sound. The Revolution works have precedent in the underground films of Andy Warhol, such as Empire which depicted the 'stillness' of the Empire State Building from day to night until film ran out of the camera. Debuting at the Tarble Arts Center is Whitehouse's Revolution: Bowl of Fruit a still-life inspired by Monet's Still Life with Apples and Grapes 1980 (Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago). As this work plays in the gallery the viewer sees barely perceptible changes in light and infinitesimal movement through a window. Whitehouse takes the fleeting quality of Impressionism that helped define the speed of modern life in the twentieth century and reveals it to be a fallacy. Look, he suggests, life moves at a much slower pace than we ever imagined.
What do you see as the world revolves before your eyes?
John Brunetti, Critic/Director Alfedena
”There has always been an edgy stillness in Whitehouse’s painting —calm lakes and skies often depicted without a clear time of day —that appeared to subliminally reference the nature of film making in which movement is created trough a series of still images strung together. He was masterful in his large canvases in creating the impression that something had happened two “frames” before, or was about to happen two “frames” ahead of the composition that was in front of the viewer. This exploitation of a moment has been honed in his new series Horizons in which he examines the dualities of movement and stasis through a series of minimal compositions of sky and water inspired by the Rothko rooms in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. All the works in the Horizons series are plein air canvases and panels that focus on the ever changing relationships of sky light and the reflective surface of the water beneath it that occur on the horizon of great lakes and oceans and Whitehouse paints them directly on site. Each Horizon is composed of two panels - the top of which accounts for a particular sky and the bottom which reflects the sky light mediated through the water below it at a particular moment. The panels are cradled so that while they are exhibited parallel to the wall they appear to float in front of the wall as pure natural light.”
Dr. J. Susan Isaacs, Chief Curator, Delaware Contemporary
“The qualities of the environment that most attracted Whitehouse in the early years of his career were its fluidity and its transitional nature, that it was never static and it never repeated itself. - J. Susan Isaacs, Curator, DCCA
Watch Series paintings are twenty four hour paintings made from direct observation of changing light in the sky over complete day/night cycles. The light observed is a result of several factors including the earth's evolving relationship to the sun, of course, and atmospheric conditions of the moment but another factor impacting perceived light is pollution levels. Particulate matter in the atmosphere is well understood to reflect and refract light and Watch in a real sense records the extent to which we are 'painting' the sky with our emissions.
Watches are sometimes made in conjunction with the making of Revolution videos (twenty-four hour videos). Some Watches take the form of twenty-four discrete observations made on the hour, every hour on separate panels. Others are continuous paintings on circular panels in which case the observed light changes are experienced as a seamless shift of the hue and value or as abrupt bands of light as when a storm flashes through the space. In either case Watch paintings are made from close, direct observation of sky light changing over time.
Whitehouse has always been interested in the physics of light, the way it behaves as both particle and wave. The Watch Series responds to some of these ideas in the different ways the pieces are configured when installed. Watch over the Water offers an image of light as both particle and wave, for example. Watch over Time offers time as a cyclical event and Watch Forward is configured as a vector to offer an image of time as a relentless progression forward.”
Artforum (Feb 2003) 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
Chicago Sun-Times (Mar 30 2001) 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. - Margaret Hawkins
New Art Examiner (Mar 2000) 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." - Polly Ullrich
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA. Perimeter Gallery, Chicago. McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. Arkansas Art Center. Tarble Art Center, Eastern Illinois University. Alfedena, Chicago. The Delaware Contemporary. David Klein Gallery, MI. Times Square, NY. Gallery Henoch, NY. Grand Rapids Art Museum. Belloc Lowndes Fine Art, Chicago. Waller Museum, IL. Chicago Cultural Center. Capstick-Dale Gallery, NY. Evanston Art Center, IL
Towson University. Grand Rapids Art Museum. Chicago Cultural Center. Alfedena, Chicago. Western Michigan University. Gallery Henoch, NY. Tory Folliard, WI. Belloc Lowndes Fine Art. Chicago. J. Cacciola Gallery, NY. Evanston Art Center, IL. Barat College, IL. Flowers East, London. Capstick-Dale Fine Art, NY. The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Llewellyn Alexander Gallery, London. Hollis Taggert Gallery, DC. Smart Museum of Art, Chicago
ESO Music Director Stephen Alltop commissioned Whitehouse to make a series of video projections to accompany live symphonic performances of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.
