David Whitaker : Serious Play

The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery is delighted to present David Whitaker: Serious Play, an exhibition showcasing thoughtful, methodical, and joyful abstract paintings by one of Britain’s most overlooked modern artists.

 

Whitaker’s art displays a purity of line executed with meticulous precision, yet his paintings are full of movement, always oscillating and seemingly radiating light. They are the product of an extraordinary drive to create. As the artist said in life, ‘energy generates energy.’

 

Born in Blackpool in 1938, trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London in the early 1960s. Abandoning his classical training for abstraction, Whitaker was drawn to Op art, a movement that was exploring the optical effects of geometric abstraction. 

 

His unique approach to this form of abstraction won him the admiration of many. In 1970 he was one of the first British artists to have a solo exhibition at the newly-established Serpentine Gallery, London. In 1973 he received the Mark Rothko Memorial Award (on Bridget Riley's recommendation) and spent a year working in New York. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the Royal Watercolour Society (of which he became a fellow). In 1996 Whitaker became the first abstract painter to win an award at the Hunting Art Prize, and achieved the same distinction at the Singer Friedlander national watercolour competition in 2000.

 

Whitaker’s energy was always focused on his practice. He was an obsessive and prolific painter. When he died in 2007, aged just 68, he left behind a treasure trove of monumental canvases, each one painstakingly thought out, as is demonstrated by a vast quantity of notebooks. Each piece is a product of his passion for oil painting, his professional training as a graphic designer, and his lifelong fascination with colour theory, learning from the writings of Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, and Ruskin.

 

In spite of his reverence for art history, long-established science, and aesthetic principles, Whitaker expressed his knowledge through techniques of art-making that he pioneered. Amongst numerous technical experiments, he applied paint by moving skateboards across the picture plane; he glued string to his canvases and applied paint through unique strokes to create a surface texture that appears like velvet. Miraculously, the product of this playful approach to art-making was never chaos but always order.

 

Since his death in 2007, there have been important survey shows of his work at the Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, and at Kingston Museum, Kingston. His paintings have been acquired by major public collections, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, York City Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Iceland.