BIO
David Whittredge is a visual artist living in Wicklow County, Ireland. Originally from Marblehead, Massachusetts (USA), his art education was in several schools in Boston with additional studies in Europe. David is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Artist’s Foundation.
He has lived in Ireland since 2012 and continues to make art in his studio in Delgany, Co Wicklow.
COMMENTARY
Ideas come to mind and they need to be explored, and that has made for a circuitous journey in my art making. Some ideas come back again and again in different forms or in different materials. If there is some master game plan it might just well be this: invent a new language and, once achieved, make poetry.
My current works, titled Sea Life, are polychrome paper sculptures that attach to the wall like paintings. They are imagined versions of alien marine life and abstracted biology. My interest and concern here is for the diminishing number of plant and animal species on Earth that ironically is occurring at the same time we are discovering new, strange species in the ocean depths. I have read that ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are extinct and wonder if I am making new species or just remembering in my bones species that have vanished.
What began as marine-like flora and fauna has morphed into coral reef imagery and my concern with the dying reefs in our warming oceans. The project is now an expanding coral reef-like structure that continually changes with the addition and subtraction of coral elements.
Earlier paintings (i.e. First Encounter, Gaslight) are like a science project with cosmic overtones. These paintings have ghosts, or some type of unnamed energy. In these paintings I was pulling together some of the best methods, materials, and notions of space I have had over the years. All materials in this group are acrylic paint on coated foam board with the exception of a few watercolors.
Weather Report Variations comprises dozens of abstracted squares that float off the wall in mural-size areas. This work is another whereby I incorporate the space of the wall into the painting to bring illusion out into physical space to suggest an imaginary dialog: flowing, falling, drifting, twisting, billowing, swirling, churning, gliding, floating, meandering, tumbling, cascading, diving, plunging, stirring, transitory. It is an installation work with dozens of variations.
The previous period of works (i.e. Paintbox Variations, Constellation, Spotsylvania, etc.) use lightweight material to build paintings that float off the wall. The shapes in the paintings are extensions that reach into the personal space of the viewer.
For works prior to that please send a message if further information is desired.
ART EDUCATION
1971-72 School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (now Tufts University)
1969-71 Art Institute of Boston (now Lesley University)
1967-68 Vesper George School of Art, Boston, (closed)
EXHIBITIONS
1990 Group Show, Boston Center for the Arts – Drawing
1985 Group Show, Boston Arts Festival – (Painting shown on local television news)
1985 Group Show, Six Painters, Northeastern University Art gallery, Boston, Massachusetts
1984 Group Show, Museum School Traveling Scholars Exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
1977 Group Show, Art in Transition: A Century of the Museum School, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
1975 One-person show, Art Institute of Boston – Conceptual art
1972 Paintings hung in private offices Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
1971 Group Show, Art Institute of Boston
AWARDS
1995 U.S. patent for animated-paper graphics device
1985 Fellowship in Painting, Massachusetts Artists Foundation (Mass Cultural Council)
1984 Traveling Scholarship, School of the MFA, Boston, Massachusetts
1971 First Prize, Boit Competition, School of the MFA, Boston, Massachusetts
Work
