WHITNEY BEDFORD

Whitney Bedford’s precise visual language combines tightly rendered detail, lush colors, and evocative gestures in reinterpretations of historical landscape paintings by artists such as Milton Avery, Pierre Bonnard, John Constable, Edouard Vuillard, and others. Her utopian images of Arcadian landscapes are a visual lexicon within which she negotiates the burden of history. She uses the materiality of paint to mark and manipulate the images, highlighting the image to locate new emotional potential in the re-worked imagery. Her most recent paintings approach landscape through a temporal lens, drawing the verdant past into conversation with the increasingly arid present. In each painting, the movement of paint describes and embodies the power and beauty of nature’s creative and destructive forces.

Whitney Bedford (b. 1976, Baltimore, Maryland) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998 and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2003. Bedford’s precise visual language combines tightly rendered detail, lush colors, and evocative gestures in reinterpretations of historical landscape paintings by artists such as Milton Avery, Pierre Bonnard, John Constable, and Edouard Vuillard. Her utopian depictions of Arcadian landscapes serve as a visual lexicon through which she negotiates the burden of history. Using the materiality of paint to mark and manipulate the imagery, she highlights and transforms her subjects, unlocking new emotional potential within reworked compositions. Her recent paintings approach landscape through a temporal lens, drawing the verdant past into conversation with an increasingly arid present. In each work, the movement of paint describes and embodies the power and beauty of nature’s creative and destructive forces.