Claire Rich – Honorable Mention Commendation for Art History for Spring 2021

Albeit strikingly similar in their stylistic execution, the compositional strategies undertaken by Frederic Whitaker in his 1966 watercolors, “Crown Fire, Grazing Sheep”, and “Fire in the Mountains” ultimately set them apart. The idyllic foreground scene creates an expositionary mood in the former, highlighting the imposing background fire’s disruptive nature. In contrast, the latter’s silhouetted foreground creates an eerily moody rendition of the fire as it encroaches even further into the viewer’s space.

Despite these different compositional and emotional strategies, the paintings are unified by the artist’s charged and layered brushstrokes. “Crown Fire, Grazing Sheep,” showcases this layered effect throughout the image, perhaps most noticeably as the foreground’s vivid green fades into a dusky purple background. The distant mountains, almost entirely obscured by smoke, retain elements of the blue sky, creating a halo effect that pushes them even further away from the viewer. This effect is also employed in “Fire in the Mountains,” as the distant mountains are constructed with alternating hues of blue and purple, their painterly edge emphasizing the hazy smoke-filled background. In both, it is impossible to draw the eye away from the image’s centerpiece: the menacing swirl of cloudy smoke. Yet, perhaps intended to mirror clouds seen on a beautiful day, the smoke cloud in “Crown Fire” remains wispy, only concentrating near the ridgeline of fires.

Similarly, in “Fire in the Mountains,” Whitaker builds color within the rising smoke, drawing emphasis to the source and emphasizing the fire’s scale as the smoke rises out of the composition’s top boundary. The artist’s technical skill can also be observed through the shared elements within the scene, where “Fire in the Mountains” appears to be the sequel image after the artist traveled further into the landscape. In the foreground of each, the proximity of each location is emphasized by illustrating similar rock formations, although each image forms the rocks’ shapes in different modes. While Crown Fire’s foreground still retains a Constable-esque idyllic scene with the sun striking the sheep and lighting the rocks, both rendered with sharp, linear strokes, the approach used in “Fire in the Mountains” is markedly different.

“Fire in the Mountains” emphasizes the painterly, moody possibility of watercolor painting. With its high contrast and red-pink flames, this image focuses more on big and sweeping swathes of color more than the particularities found in “Crown Fire.” In some ways, these images highlight the essential differences between Constable and his contemporary, JMW Turner. While the former focused on the effects of light in his beloved surroundings, Turner immersed himself in the sublime possibility of natural disasters. “Fire in the Mountains” echoes some of Turner’s skillset, namely the incredible way in which the swirling brushstrokes capture the chaos of the moment. Whitaker does this in full effect within the smoke but roots the scene in a grounded scape of a rocky foreground and distant mountains. Much like the foreground of “Crown Fire” emphasizes the pre-fire moment, the loosely defined and shadowed rocks in “Fire in the Mountains” details the destruction and devastation evident in the magnified scene. Perhaps adopting the darker color scheme to illustrate the bleak outlook of such large-scale forest fires or to bring to the forefront the reality of the scorched earth in the fire’s wake, the painterly silhouetted scene in the foreground emphasizes the gloomy mood of this image.

In the end, these images serve as two sides of a single coin: on the one hand, “Crown Fire” emphasizes the looming danger and draws attention to the beauty a fire disrupts. Retaining the color scheme of a scene unaffected by, and perhaps unknowing of the danger to come, “Crown Fire” preludes the up-close reality of Fire in the Mountains, where the disaster becomes impossible to ignore. While “Crown Fire” draws attention to the fire in the way that it encroaches on normality through a particular and detailed application of the medium, “Fire in the Mountains” utilizes the painterly and unruly nature of watercolor to demonstrate the difficult to nature of fire, similarly challenging to control, and its marks equally permanent. In this way, these images work extraordinarily well as a series, a documentation of multiple aspects of natural disaster, reflected through carefully thought and out and purposefully executed stylistic approaches.