Whitaker Family Artists: Three Generations of Art

Irwin A Whitaker, his daughter Eve Whitaker, and then her son Solomon Whitaker were and are artists. Irwin died in 2009 yet several themes travel within the family’s art-making process including: the human figure, landscape, visual complexity, both occupied and unoccupied spaces among many lighter and somewhat darker subjects. Irwin, while working with kilns and intense heat was drawn to the form of fire and trees. Eve, having seen books of the atrocities in Guatemala in the 1980s painted bodies in piles. Solomon briefly shared that visual language. Irwin and Solomon shared the peaceful dynamism of landscapes.

There are things these three artists share but also a love of contradictions. Irwin enameled desolate landscapes onto copper panels and constructed delicate ceramic vessels; Eve painted intimate family narratives. Solomon brought writing and music into his creative practice. Eve chose to find comfort in her family and a rural existence. Solomon and Irwin painted landscapes; yet Eve painted interiors most often. Eve uses death and aging, her family, trust and also the living in her work. Solomon lives in the city and sees less of the country than he would like. Irwin largely chose to focus on the brighter side of life. There were however things he could not ignore such as the death of his wife to a brutal Cancer or the Korean war or the annihilative threat from the Bay of Pigs crisis. He began doing Crucifixions that were violent and pestilent in reaction to whatever sorts of conflict he was feeling. Eve and Solomon are still piecing together what those specifically were. He often felt that by not doing this sort of thing he would serve humanity better. Yet there were clearly times that he needed art for its therapeutic purpose. Eve found therapeutics in art as well. Given she lost her mother as a teenager in a very harsh way her visual descriptions of the human body in regression and death are visceral and haunting. Though this is not the only way in which she works. Her ‘Celebrations’ series or the ‘Around the Table’ works are joyful expressions of family, trust and color.

Solomon also finds contradiction in his work; as the experience of mental illness has manifest a struggle to contain a mania of emotion and thought. He is consistently boxing in the excesses of his mind into works that he very much would like people to understand. These works are often esoteric and confusing. They often have appendages that seem unnecessary or crammed, urgent and never fully resolved. He fits so many things into his works that resolution may never be possible. But he tries to make sense of and combine disparate and differentiated methods and disciplines. He deconstructs and constructs, looking for rhizomes that connect the branches of academic object making. He tries to bring creative methods together. He was brought up to try many things. Later in life he now struggles to combine and focus. His disability forces him to withdraw and find stillness from a chaotic onslaught of online media and stimuli. His mother and grandfather found refuge in the peace of rural and natural environments perhaps this is where he finds it as well.