Congratulations on receiving an Art History Honorable Mention/ Spring 2022 and best wishes ongoing to:
Eleanor Miller, Senior at Colgate University, Art and Visual Culture / Art Management
“During my time earning my undergraduate degree in Art History, I have found art to be not only the most enjoyable, but one of the most accurate ways to interpret a history, a culture or a person’s life experience. It captures more than a record of events, although sometimes that is the goal of the artwork. Often, steeped in intimacy and personality, artwork captures the thoughts of a person at its time of making–whether or not those thoughts are political, personal or in between does not really matter. There are consistencies in art and stories that transcend a time period or political movement, but every person’s life is informed by their broader context.
Personally, I see studying art as a particular way to study people and their thoughts, feelings and aspirations, as well as a history of the collective, broader context of the artists. As I have grown in this field throughout my time at Colgate University, I have learned more about why I love studying art, and why I want to continue to do that in the future. After my undergraduate degree, I intend to apply for doctoral programs in visual contemporary art. I am hoping to go into a profession in which I can share my knowledge and passion for art and art history with other people, whether through a teaching position in the academy or as a curator in a museum-context.
During my time at Colgate, I have found teaching to be incredibly rewarding, as I teach outdoor education classes at least twice a week as one of four Staff Trainers for Colgate’s Outdoor Education program. In this position, I plan the curriculum, teach the classes, and lead trips with my three co-trainers. Having this experience has solidified my desire to marry my love for art and art history and my love for teaching in my future career.
In addition to majoring in Art History and my extracurricular teaching and outdoors experience, I am also a Museum Assistant for the Picker Art Gallery, where I am aiding in the curation of an upcoming exhibition to open on February 10, 2022. I am currently curating the 3-Dimensional works that will be featured in the exhibition about contemporary Indigenous artists from the Great Lakes region.
My love for art, as well as my love for interpreting, discussing and thinking about it, are what inspire me when I think about my future.”
Honorable Mention Scholarship Essay / Eleanor Miller
Compare and contrast the 2 paintings shown below:
Ethereal and surreal, Eileen Monaghan Whitaker’s Orchid (1975) is grounded by the suggestion of water in the foreground and the large orchid in the background. Connecting these two elements is a sitting nude woman, seemingly floating above the water under her right foot. Her hair melts into the abstracted floral background as the watercolors stream vertically down to the edge of the canvas, suggestive of stems. Colors spread into one another, as dry brushing and intentional bleeding connects the various elements of the painting, creating a connected composition. In this work, representational and abstracted elements are paired to create this dream-like scene.
Similarly, Frederic Whitaker’s Recumbent Nude (Eileen) (1944) features a dream-like scene, but his is planted in reality. Where Monaghan Whitaker’s scene is as if from a dream, Whitaker’s painting depicts a woman who looks to be dreaming. Soft light highlights her body from the left, her back towards the viewer. Resting on a floor with papers and textiles strewn about, texture seems to be a focus of Whitaker’s in these foregrounded elements. The subject’s body, the pillow she is using, and the paper in front of her are all explorations of how the light plays with different textures. Like Monaghan Whitaker’s abstracted florals, Whitaker seems to only suggest the shapes of the backgrounded elements, like the flowers behind the woman, or the divider–pulling the eye back to the texturally detailed body of the woman and what she is sleeping on.
The sense of light in Monaghan Whitaker’s painting is spread out, as if not coming from a singular source, but a general luminosity, like the lighting on a cloudy day. Whitaker’s painting necessitates light from a particular source, perhaps due to its foundation in reality. These paintings could also be examples of the artists’ distinct goals in watercolor painting. Eileen Monaghan Whitaker once described herself as “feeling her way through painting,” and often took to comparing the human figure to natural elements and environments. In Orchid, this nymph-esque scene is also a comparative exploration of the figure and the flower: made to be the same size, the orchid and the woman are mutually constructive natural elements that are both the main subjects of the painting. Monaghan Whitaker might be “feeling” her way through this painting in the abstracted and surreal elements, like the floral background, suggestion of water, and lack of a clear ground on which the woman is sitting.
Frederic Whitaker, who described his style as wanting to seem “effortless, as if [he] had left it wet and it had accidentally dried into a perfect picture,” has also been described as meticulously thinking through his paintings. Planning, practicing and then transferring the watercolor onto the final sheet, his work was all but effortless. That said, looking at Recumbent Nude, the ease of the scene and the occasional translucence of the paint implies a quick sketch: as if Whitaker captured the scene in mere minutes. Looking more closely, however, the intricacies of the work reveal themselves. The textural details of the painting, paired with the medium of watercolor, show an intense attention to planning and practical technique.
While both of these works feature explorations of the female figure and their respective environments, the approach each artist takes is different, with seemingly different goals. Eileen Monaghan Whitaker seems to be interested in immersing the figure into a surreal and natural environment: the colors mingle as well as the figures, developing a scene that is more like a thought experiment, or a dream than reality. Frederic Whitaker, on the other hand, explores how the figure, like her environment, is affected by the soft light from the window. He creates a dream-like setting in reality. By placing the figure in a house, grounding her in a clear, realistic setting, while also using a sketchy and seemingly effortless technique, he creates the illusion that this painting is an instantaneous capture of a moment when a woman is asleep, daydreaming on her floor.
References
“Eileen Monaghan Whitaker,” The Frederic Whitaker and Eileen Monaghan Whitaker Foundation, https://whitakerwatercolors.org/eileen-whitaker/
“Eileen Monaghan Whitaker, N.A., Biography,” The Frederic Whitaker and Eileen Monaghan Whitaker Foundation, https://whitakerwatercolors.org/eileen-whitaker/biography/
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