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| Phil Whiting b.1948 |
Studied: Newcastle College of Art, Portsmouth College of Art, Falmouth College of Art
Vice chair of The Newlyn Society of Artists 2007
Arts Council Award 1981
.
Recent one-person exhibitions:
2012
'Landscape and Memory: Paintings from the Cornish Landscape', Belgrave St Ives
'Places of Mourning in the Western World', Truro Cathedral, Cornwall
2009
'Remembrance', New College, University of Oxford
'Land, Memory and the Anxiety of Erasure', Stuart House Museum, Liskeard, Cornwall
2008
'Srebrenica and Remembrance', Truro Cathedral, Cornwall
'Phil Whiting', Bayart Gallery, Cardiff
'Srebrenica', The Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, Cornwall
2006
'Srebrenica', The Yehudi Menuhin Space, European Parliament Building, Brussels
2005-08
The Rainyday Gallery, Penzance, Cornwall
2005
'Cornwall Paintings', The Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire
2003
'Phil Whiting', The Counthouse National Trust Gallery, Botallack, Cornwall
Selected recent mixed exhibitions:
2011
'Echoes and Traces', Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton
2010
'Salmagundi', Belgrave St Ives
'Phil Whiting and Oliver Whiting', The Rainyday Gallery, Penzance
2009
'A Cornish Perspective', Royal West of England Academy Galleries, Bristol
2008
'Six of One Half a Dozen of the Other', Belgrave Gallery St Ives
2007
'St Ives 1975-2005 Book Launch Exhibition', selected artists, Belgrave Gallery St Ives
'Unquiet Earth', St Ives Society of Artists Gallery, Norway Square, St Ives
'Art Now Cornwall', Goldfish Contemporary, Penzance, Cornwall
'NSA Selection', Goldfish Contemporary, Penzance
2005
'Nicholas Usherwood's Choice', Campden Gallery, Gloucestershire
'Norbert Lynton's Choice', Lemon Street Gallery, Truro, Cornwall
'NSA Selection', Thompson's City Gallery, London, (highlighted artist)
2004
'J.R.Taylor's Choice', Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall (commended artist by visiting Arts
Minister Estelle Morris MP)
2003
'Joan Bakewell's Choice', Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall
2002
'Two Painters Explore Western Approaches', Cable and Wireless Museum, Porthcurno
'Weather Forecast 1', Showcase Exhibition, Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall
Site specific artwork
2010-12
'Light a Candle for Hope', Holocaust Memorial Day, Truro Cathedral, Cornwall
2010
'Glasbury Arts Festival', guest artist, Glasbury, Powys
2007
'Babes Big Barn Dance', auction for Children's Hospice South West, Royal Hospital
Gardens, Chelsea
Curated projects:
2011
Exhibition, 'Amnesty International 50th Anniversary Cornwall Schools Art Exhibition',
Truro Cathedral, Cornwall
2007 Exhibition, 'Unquiet Earth', St Ives Society of Artists Gallery, Norway Square
2005 Selector, 'St Ives Festival Open Exhibition', St Ives Society of Artists Gallery, Cornwall
2003 Exhibition, 'Invitations', co-curated with artist Sue Buefo, Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall
Collaborations:
2011 Composer John Storer
2009 New College Choir, Oxford
Playwrite Simon Parker, in conjunction with Sterts Theatre
2008-11 Composer Russell Pascoe, with choir Confitemini
2008 Poet Victoria Field, in conjunction with Truro Cathedral
The Cornwall Heartlands Project, Camborne, Cornwall
Residencies:
2009 New College, Oxford
2006 The European Parliament, Brussels
2005 Srebrenica, Bosnia, in conjunction with The Fund for Refugees in Slovenia
2003 The Counthouse Workshop National Trust Gallery, Botallack, Cornwall
Recent Bibliography:
2011 'Echoes and Traces', Geoffrey Bertram.
'Professional Artist Inspires Students', West Briton, 27th January.
2010 'Called by Mind and Spirit; Crossing the Borderlands of Childhood', Gavin and Joanna
Knight.'The Newsletter of the Mental Health Resource Group of the College of Health Care Chaplains', using the painting
'Shoah' as "the pivotal focus between mental health and spiritual development", Gavin and Jo Knight.
2009 'Painting Rises Like a Phoenix', Simon Parker, Western Morning News, 5th May 2009,
'Deeper Meaning', Artist and Illustrator, March.
Annual Review 2008, Truro Cathedral, June.
'Srebrenica and Remembrance', catalogue, Canon Philip Lambert, Truro Cathedral.
'Philip Whiting', Buzz Magazine, Aug.
'Artists' Work Reflects Man's Inhumanity To Man', Simon Parker (double page spread),
Western Morning News, 22nd Jan.
2008 'Phil Whiting's Cornwall in Winter', Frank Ruhrmund, St Ives Times and Echo, Jan.
'Whiting's Work Powerful and Emotive', David Trigg, Metro, 26th Aug.
2007 St Ives 1975-2005: Art Colony in Transition, Peter Davies.
'Oil Paintings in Public Collections, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly', The Public Catalogue Foundation.
2007 'Babes Big Barn Dance', catalogue, foreword by Hugo Swire MP, June.
2007 'Phil Whiting' Painter', Pip Palmer, Galleries Magazine, Jan.
2007 'Artists Diary 2006', Cornwall Today, Jan.
2007 'Phil Whiting Recent Paintings', Cornwall Life, Jan.
2006 'In the Womens' Block', The Guardian, 16th Sept.
2006 'Srebrenica', catalogue, forewords by Professor Paul Gough, Roman Halter, and Shadow
Culture Secretary Hugo Swire MP.
2002 ARTNSA, Newlyn Society of Artists.
2001 'Images of Cornish Tin', Alan Stoyel and Peter Williams, English Heritage.
2000 'Mining Heritage Inspires Artist', The West Briton, Nov.9th.
2000 'Phil Paints Penwith Mines with Singular Passion', Cornwall Arts, Winter.
PHIL WHITING Landscape and Memory
In April 1990, a day before his untimely road death, the leading art critic Peter
Fuller wrote to the expressionistic painter Phil Whiting that 'there are no
guarantees when we make aesthetic judgements.' While Fuller's sentiment
perhaps identifies the aesthetic relativism of the so-called post-modern era,
casting doubt on modernist idealism and faith in a progressive future, there
remains an unyielding moral imperative in much contemporary art and in Whiting's
work in particular.
This moral dimension in fact informs Whiting's whole artistic project. By
portraying places of extreme violence and depravity it holds a mirror up to man's
follies and shortcomings. Stylistically, too, Whiting's expressionism fulfils Fuller's
call for a return to the earth and helps reinvigorate the romanticism of the British
landscape tradition. Whiting does this in terms of vigorous and robust use of
materials - usually charcoal and acrylic paint - which fashion sweeping and tonally
dramatic drawings and pictures with their haunting Nashian quagmires of paint.
Coinciding with this current Belgrave St Ives show is a display at Truro
Cathedral based on the series 'Places of Mourning in the Western World'.
Following on from a 2006 exhibition at the European Parliament Building in
Brussels, a show highlighting the horrors of the Bosnian conflict all-to-close to us
in terms of time and place, Whiting depicts for a Cornish audience visited sites like
Ground Zero or the Death Camps. A token work 'Aftermath - Palestinian Refugee
Camp' (2010) appears at Belgrave in order to link in with the Truro exhibits.
The St Ives show comprises recent medium sized acrylics - mostly brooding
wintry depictions of inhospitable Cornish moorland or of obsolete, closed-down
mining country with its diminutive insignia of poignantly abandoned chimneys,
engine houses and shafts. They are a winter's tale of heavy skies and dark, churned
earth. The artist is inspired by winter, which he justly describes as 'a more physical
time to be in the landscape.' They are studio works though based on rapid plein
air notations. Nothing could be further from the consoling picture postcard impressionism
of high summer Cornish resorts, a tradition that is anathema to Whiting. There is nothing dainty or neatly illustrative in Whiting's oeuvre, only a tactile plasticity that unifies form and content so absolutely. The changing tonal and chromatic drama of works like 'The Tin Mine at Sunset' (2011), 'Wild Ponies on Godolphin Moor' (2011) or 'On the Wild Moor, Caer Bran' (2011) are palpably
real, yet form metaphors of human mood and psychodrama. The painterly
animation of the Constable oil sketch, of Turner's atmospherics and of Lanyon's
weather paintings are ably and aptly achieved.
Despite alighting on tangible Cornish landscape themes - emotive ones to do
with the passing of the Cornish tin mining industry - Whiting's paintings perhaps
belong stylistically to the urban expressionism of Bomberg and his metropolitan
'followers' Auerbach and Kossoff, and of the apocalyptic German artist, Kiefer.
But the Hull-born and Newcastle-trained Whiting also displays northern origins
when emulating the earthy gravitas of Sheila Fell and Theodore Major, two north
country painters whose respective rural Cumbrian and industrial Lancashire
themes are, in Whiting's capable hands, transferred to Cornwall, that remote and
forbidding yet irresistible granite peninsula on the wild Atlantic edge.
Peter Davies, December 2011
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