Whitaker Watercolors

Eleanor Miller – Honorable Mention for Art History Essay Fall 2020

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Eleanor Miller is passionate about art historical research and contemplation. She’s a sophomore at Colgate University. In her student statement she wrote: “My absolute favorite classes have been in art history; beginning with my first semester freshman year when I took Native Arts of North America–a class that focused on different indigenous cultures across various North American regions through their art. To me, this course blended culture and history, showing me that the two will always be linked, justifying my love and desire to study history and culture through art. While this was my first university course in art history, I completed my first research in the field as a senior in high school, to gain my AP Capstone Diploma. This project focused on the visual culture of the Women’s Suffrage movement in the greater Philadelphia area, where I am from. This project sparked my love for this research, and I was unable to look back.

Since then, I have worked on the Brandywine River Museum’s Votes for Women: A Visual History exhibition, showing from February 2020 to September 2020, as a research associate, and been published in the exhibition literature. This academic year, I have taken a course in museum theory, and 1960’s visual theory. My dream is to go onto graduate school, and eventually gain a doctorate in this field, so I can teach at a university level. The value of this work can be seen through how art manifests in culture, ultimately creating representations of that culture and that world to help the viewer see it differently. Whether it is impressionists using their strokes to represent sounds, or Donald Judd installing a ladder in a gallery to discuss the labor of art, artists create their work people can see and think differently. I want to be part of that narrative through critical discussion, and education. 

The essay question for this round of the Art History/Museum Studies scholarship is: Frederic Whitaker and Eileen Monaghan Whitaker often painted similar subjects including these watercolors of Washingtonian Palms in California. Compare and contrast these two paintings “Washingtonian Palms” 1970 © Eileen Monaghan Whitaker 22×30 inches Watercolor and “Washingtonian Palms” 1968 © Frederic Whitaker 22×27.5 inches Watercolor 
 
Eleanor Miller’s Essay
Although these two paintings are of the same subjects in the same medium, they create and use two completely different perspectives, thereby revealing the complex nature of perspective as it relates to understanding. In Eileen Monaghan Whitaker’s “Washingtonian Palms,” she focuses in on the detail of the palms themselves, using more muted tones, dynamic silhouettes, and detailed attention to the patterns of the bark. Contrastly, Frederic Whitaker reveals a more expansive perspective. His landscape is still, and saturated with color, revealing the size of the subjects in relation to the on-lookers in the bottom right corner of the scene. Whitaker’s perspective draws attention to the spatial relation of these trees, rather than Monaghan Whitaker’s more intimate perspective. The contrast between these two pieces reveals how perspective affects understanding.
 
Delving deeper into Monaghan Whitaker’s piece, the eye is drawn directly to the foreground, in which exists the trunk of a Washingtonian palm. Rather than focus on the entire silhouette of the tree, as is common when encountering one as large as this, Monaghan Whitaker invites the viewer to see detail in the trunk: a place where the eye is not used to being drawn. The background of the scene is quite bare, suggesting an expansive setting, but helping to draw the focus into the detail of the trunk. This all points to the goal of this piece: to generate a new kind of intimacy with this species of plant, as it exists in southern California. Monaghan Whitaker has a history of creating intimacy between the subject and the viewer through the focused portrayal of that subject in a limited scene. Her works throughout her time in Mexico are excellent examples of her focus on intimacy, as she mostly depicted individuals rather than larger scenes. Monaghan Whitaker’s pattern of intimate perspective, rather than Whitaker’s scenic perspective, emerges as a defining contrast between the two artists; a pattern in which these small samples of their respective oeuvres fit.
 
While Whitaker may not favor close intimacy with the palms he depicts in “Washingtonian Palms,” his focus on spatial awareness and situation allows for an aesthetic appreciation of the vastness of not only the trees, but their environment. Where Monaghan Whitaker reduces the impact of the background, Whitaker gives his background the same attention as his subjects, seamlessly situating them in their environment. To scale the trees, he adds people, which are also integrated into the environment. The effect of creating a liminal, and closed environment distances the viewer from the piece. The audience becomes an outsider, whereas in Monaghan Whitaker’s piece, the audience is experiencing the trees as if they were right in front of them. Whitaker’s perspective not only grants an aesthetic appreciation for the trees within their environment, but perhaps alludes to a distanced intimacy that he feels with such a scene. The colors he uses are saturated and hyperbolized, adding to the beauty, but distancing the scene from reality. His perspective is masked in what seems like another landscape piece–often distanced and hyper-romantic–but when paired next to Monaghan Whitaker’s piece, there is an observable familiarity with the setting. The colors now allude more to a feeling than to sight: the perfection of the landscape, while perhaps rendered and false, nods to a dream-like, loving sentiment to the subjects. This layer of distanced intimacy is highlighted by the piece’s relation to Monaghan Whitaker’s perspective.
 
Without the interaction between the two pieces, parts of the audience’s understanding would be lost. Superficially, if one were to only look at Monaghan Whitaker’s piece, one would not know how big the trees are. Whitaker’s piece adds scaling and situation. However, these two individuals chose to represent the same trees in different ways, suggesting that the essence of these trees speaks differently to each artist. While Monaghan Whitaker felt the best way to represent the subject was through a discussion of closeness and detail, Whitaker felt that they were better represented by distance, alluding to the role perspective plays in understanding. As the viewer, one’s perspective is shaped by the artist, and to only see one of these pieces, is to limit one’s own perspective and understanding.

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