Neon orange and pink willows obscure the view of The Terrace, Pierre Bonnard’s 1918 painting of what he could see from the terrace of his house—an untamed panoramic landscape next to the river Seine.
The large diptych inspired by Bonnard’s bucolic early 20th century painting is LA-based artist Whitney Bedford’s inspired look at the past through the eyes of the present.
“I just kind of concentrate on the dissonance between the way things are and the way things were and not kind of commenting on which one’s better and which one’s worse,” Bedford said. “It’s the job of an artist to metabolize precedence. So, I’m just working through the archives of older paintings.”
Native California vegetation act as characters looking through windows into historic landscapes, views that look very different today thanks to urbanization and climate change. Bedford’s acrylic and oil Veduta series of paintings “bridge the natural, the historic, and the imagined” in The Window, a solo exhibition of her work, which opened in the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art’s (SLOMA) gray wing at the end of October.
Fluorescent palms, saguaro cactus, eucalyptus, pine, willows, cypress, manzanita, and other California natives are the first thing to hit Bedford’s canvas (wood with linen). An assistant follows behind her, intricately taping over the acrylic paint. Bedford then sketches out the background before using oil paint to re-create the reimagined historic landscape paintings.
“They’re looking out at the past, essentially,” she said. “So our landscapes looking at the historical landscapes to comment on how we look back on history.”
The neon colors act as “sirens,” Bedford said, siren songs about the current landscape lending an apocalyptic tone to the unspoiled nature of the past.
It’s a great project for an artist, she said, because she’s learning how to paint many different styles that she wouldn’t normally paint, learning how to become a better painter through others.
“I don’t adhere to the idea that originality is the most important thing. … It’s not as important for me to be original as it is for me to use the tools,” Bedford said. “I feel like a lot of emphasis is on originality, and that’s just impossible to do in this day and age.”
Architecture, art, and history all inform her work, she said. She studied architecture and history in tandem with the art she focused on in high school, college, and as a post-grad. There’s so much to learn from precedent, she added.
Bedford’s work is underpinned by drawing, something she said “acts as a scaffolding for the paint.”
It’s a technique she started to lean into while she was pregnant with her daughter in 2015. She couldn’t work with paint as much because of the fumes associated with it. So instead, she would draw and place a little bit of paint over the top.
Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, she’s lived all over the world studying art on the East Coast and in Germany, France, Scotland, and Italy, eventually attending UCLA to get a Master of Fine Arts degree. But she said she never really considered herself a Californian until her daughter was born.
“It kind of changed the fulcrum,” Bedford said. “Because I was going to be raising a Californian.”
California vegetation and landscapes are kind of an homage to her daughter being born, she said. She used the characters, native trees and vegetation, on stark backgrounds, with two-tone colors, eventually starting to use the older paintings as maps to place her paintings, she said.
“I take liberties with them. I see them as stage sets,” she said. “These bucolic landscapes that don’t exist anymore.”
She uses the older paintings as a background to focus on the foreground with vibrant colors.
“The color is really the agitator, it directs you,” she said. “I love color. It’s really what my love language is.”
As an artist, she said, she wants people to have their own experiences with her work. She loves when her paintings are really big, because then the viewer can be immersed in the space, actually feel like they’re in the painting.
In some cases, the work she’s using as the background were large paintings, but in others, those paintings were small. Bedford explained that the premise behind them is that people would travel on these grand tours, and rather than buying a post card, they would buy little paintings and send them back—almost like a window into their travels.
SLOMA Chief Curator and Education Director Emma Saperstein said she was really struck by Bedford’s practice, the way she’s engaging art history to create paintings that are uniquely her own.
The Window exhibition is a way to tie the museum’s past with its present. Prior to the current iteration of the museum, which reopened post-COVID-19 with Leann Standish at the helm and a new vision, the museum did a lot of plein air exhibitions.
“I’d been thinking about the history of landscape painting at the museum,” Saperstein said. “I’ve been wanting to find a way to engage that history in a really contemporary way.”
See Bedford’s paintings at SLOMA through mid-February. Δ
Editor Camillia Lanham wishes her office had a window with views of the Seine. Send postcards to clanham@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 10, 2024.