A show that'll leave you spinning

Ben Whitehouse's show is about savoring our time-based experience of natural landscape and the world around us. So avoid rushing through his solo exhibit at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts.

Instead, sit back and relax even as the display's title, "Revolution," is mentioned, for it refers to the 24 hours it takes the earth to rotate completely on its axis.

Surely the most strikingly innovative feature of this distinguished show is the way Whitehouse combines traditional oil painting with video and produces remarkably unified results.

His paintings come in clusters. One set presents 31 small oils painted realistically in the open air of Lake Michigan's watery horizon line, done at the same time on 31 consecutive days - no two images alike atmospherically.

A double-set of 48 small paintings represents patches of skylight over Central Park that he painted every hour of the day for 24 hours. These take the form of flat abstractions arranged as a color wheel on the wall.

That such imagery can deal with vast landscapes is further amplified in two digital videos presented in real time (24 hours of it) and displayed on 65-inch plasma screens.

Both videos are complete artworks in themselves, and for each, Whitehouse spent 24 hours on location. One by this London-born Chicago resident is a lake scene emphasizing the transitional experience of natural phenomena.

Especially awesome, however, is the other one, "Central Park" in Manhattan, a high-resolution overview looking uptown and beyond on a sunny day. Contributing much enhancement to this ever-changing picture is the accompanying sound track of distant, identifiable sounds such as cars' blaring horns in traffic, whistles, and even the clickety-clack of carriage horses' hooves as the afternoon noises intensify.

"Revolution" is a revelation, and well worth your close and unhurried attention any hour of the day.

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Plein-airist tweaks genre to enhance plain views

Ben Whitehouse has spent his artistic life devoted to the method of painting known as en plein air, French for "in the open air."

The appeal of the experience is basic: Painting while outdoors allows the artist to study and recreate scenes as natural light affects them. One challenge is that the Earth tends to continue spinning, and the light changes with it.

Monet, whose plein-air work has influenced greatly Whitehouse's perspective, would paint a scene as it appeared in one moment, wait an hour and paint the scene again. Whitehouse, a 45-year-old from Great Britain who now lives in the Chicago area, always has wondered about the moments in between. Aren't they equally important?

So Whitehouse, known for painting landscapes at scales of 10 to 12 feet wide by 6 to 7 feet tall ("to honor," he says, "the great scale of natural landscapes"), spent the past three years inventing ways of incorporating those moment-to-moment shifts into his paintings.

The results are on display in the two DuPont Galleries at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts through Jan. 6. "Revolution" is a large-scale project in two ways: It attempts to capture the essence of light in one area during a period of time -- 24 hours with three of its pieces and one month with a fourth -- and it is physically expansive, a rare two-gallery solo show at the DCCA that includes two collections of paintings, two digital installations and a fifth piece that is his response to the attacks of Sept. 11.

One work, "Watch over Central Park," comprises 48 plein-air panels painted in New York City's Central Park during a 24-hour period. Whitehouse chose a spot in the park and brought enough water and eggplant sandwiches to sustain him for a day. He looked to the eastern sky and found a patch that he could revisit throughout the day, having framed the view within the interstice between two branches of a nearby tree. He did the same with a patch of the western sky.

The other collection, "March," arranges as in a calendar 31 11-by-14-inch plein-air canvases. Each depicts what he saw on a morning in March 2004, when he awoke each day and observed at the same time the same view of Lake Michigan, which is a block from his former studio. Every canvas is different, some more than others, with a surprising variance in the colors of the lake and sky.

The digital pieces, called "Revolution Northbar Lake" and "Revolution Central Park," are seamless, 24-hour high-definition videos whose unique process of creation led Whitehouse to apply for a patent. They recorded every movement and shift of light in one location and are meant to be viewed in real time. At the DCCA, each video plays on a 65-inch Panasonic plasma monitor.

"The big story about that kind of experience," Whitehouse says of plein-air painting, "is the fleeting and transitional quality of natural phenomena. Despite the Impressionistic experiment, you're fundamentally stuck with the problem that painting is a frozen experience. I was always interested in catching a particular moment and extending it into eternity through painting -- you can sustain this note forever."

Also in the exhibition is "September," a 56-by-69-inch landscape painted in the American heartland, one of Whitehouse's most cherished muses. The upper two-thirds are of the sky, dominated by dark and smoky clouds; the bottom third depicts a tranquil field with trees on the distant horizon. Those two parts of the painting are on separate, oddly shaped canvases -- a narrow, triangular wedge of empty space divides them.

The ever-changing makeup of landscapes makes them difficult to capture visually. Artists must find themselves in the right place at the right time, accept a dull image, or kill an entire day in search of expansive clouds, delicate beams of sunlight and the perfect alignment of land and sky. Chicago painter Ben Whitehouse uses the latter approach — sort of.

The mixed-media exhibit "Revolution" takes the long-form, high-definition digital videos he shot in order to study how a swatch of scenery changes from dawn to dusk, and matches them with his paintings of selected stills. If you're into relaxing to the sights and sounds of nature captured in the videos, pay attention for the morphing of nimbus clouds behind a row of windblown trees, the red glow of vehicle taillights driving through nocturnal Central Park, and the hours when Michigan's North Bar Lake is so still, it casts a glassy reflection of the horizon line above.

However, Whitehouse's videos are 24 hours long, a full revolution of Earth — hence the exhibit's name. Factor in a gallery that doesn't open before 10 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m., and we've got a conundrum where visitors may miss out on the color pageantry of morning skies, or the silhouetted clouds of the sunset. Thankfully, a capable watercolorist is highlighting those moments when we couldn't be there.

With the current craze surrounding HD technology, it was only a matter of time before a serious artist successfully integrated his artwork with the high definition capturing television and film audiences.

Ben Whitehouse exhibits his latest project at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts: an on-going project called Revolution that involves a series of landscapes he filmed in high definition for a straight 24 hours (or one revolution of the Earth). The show exhibits these 24-hour recordings in real time on large, high definition plasma screens in two of DCCA's galleries.

As a child, Whitehouse, a landscape artist, grew up in film as his father was a British movie director, so he's always been aware of and interested in the film industry.

In the 1980s, Whitehouse saw a movie that was filmed in Scotland. He said he was fascinated by not only the landscape, but also by the director's habit of lingering on the exquisite landscape for just a few seconds before entering a scene. It was this attention to the background that struck Whitehouse and left a lasting impression; as he created his own works, he wanted to create something similar.

"I wanted to continue that moment into eternity," Whitehouse said.

This frame of mind inspired him to enlarge his landscape art and paint unusually large landscapes, usually ranging from about six feet by more than nine feet to about eight feet by 12 feet, to capture the depth of the scenes.

"Revolution comes from that thinking," explained Whitehouse.

He was already filming scenes, which he'd paint his landscapes by, when, about three or four years ago, he began thinking about the videos themselves as potential art.

In the 1990s, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Whitehouse saw "Monet in the 90s" at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the idea was born of recording - through paint or film - one scene during various times of day or the year and looking at the changes that could bring.

"Seeing the Grainstacks lined up on the wall, the idea of the paintings as film frames (and the spaces between them as missing frames) became apparent to me," Whitehouse said. "I hadn't considered the filmic qualities of Monet's project prior to that time and wondered how I could account for the transition experience of natural phenomena in my own work."

He began experimenting more with film, and eventually figured out how to make the videos his art. For 24 hours straight, he filmed a single spot straight through, without shifting or stopping the film.

"Not a second is missing. Every shift of light, every moment that occurs within the composition is captured in the piece for an entire 24-hour period," he said.

It's the result of this project - a looping, 24-hour moving piece of artwork - that creates Revolution.

To film these 24-hour scenes in high definition, Whitehouse had to work with Apple and Panasonic to actually create the technology he used.

To make the art truly spontaneous and natural, Whitehouse said he did not check the weather before he filmed and he filmed each scene only once, and for exactly 24-hours, so he was not editing and choosing his favorite scenes.

"I just let what happens, happen," Whitehouse said. "You put yourself out there and say, 'Planet, do your thing,' and you watch and record it."

So far, Whitehouse has five scenes completed, Nachusa Grasslands in Illinois, Central Park in New York City, and Lake Michigan, Treetops and North Bar Lake all filmed during trips to Michigan. (Selections of each are available online at www.WhitehouseStudio.com.)

Only two of those, Central Park and North Bar Lake, will be on display at DCCA beginning on Aug. 17, along with selections from his other projects. Whitehouse said he plans to add additional Revolution pieces, but not for this show.

Another interesting piece Whitehouse is exhibiting is his March project, a series of 31 paintings of the shore of Lake Michigan at Leone Park Beach in Chicago, Illinois. He painted the landscape between 9 and 11 a.m. on each of the 31 days in March 2004, and arranged them to resemble a calendar page, which makes the changes in the scene depicted in each painting more apparent.

"It's amazing how the same scene changed each day. Some are so similar, and others so different," Whitehouse said.

Alan Artner, Tribune art critic
Published June 1, 2007

Ben Whitehouse is a painter of the open air who attempts to fix fugitive conditions of light.

His seeming departure at the Alfedena Gallery actually extends what he does in painting to high-definition video landscapes that show light continually transforming three different places.

New York's Central Park, plus a body of water and group of treetops in Illinois, have been observed from a fixed point for 24 hours. The time of day shown is coordinated to the time of viewing, so one sees a locale apart from one's own within one's own geographical and seasonal environment.

The changes in the New York piece are especially beautiful, as the park's entire South-to-North expanse is dappled by light that breaks through clouds as ambient sound wafts up from streets. Since the changes are experienced in actual time, the pieces are as much as anything else studies in patience that have achieved heightened intensity from having had the "real" world given a sharper focus by the frame Whitehouse put around them.

The artist also shows a group of recent multi-panel paintings that likewise fix light conditions in particular landscapes. The most successful is "March," which approaches the same stretch of Lake Michigan at the same time every day of the month. It has a hard, direct poetry not shared by other pieces that present qualities of light as if on swatches unusually arranged, sometimes like numbers on the face of a clock.

Chicago Sun-Times, Gallery Glance

by Margaret Hawkins, May 25, 2007

Ben Whitehouse: Revolution
Alfedena Gallery, Chicago
Through June 2, 2007

Ben Whitehouse is a respected landscape painter known for his subtle and subdued portrayals of Midwestern landscapes, his sensitivity to which is even more notable for his not being a native but a transplanted Englishman. Thus, his video work may seem oddly cool and out of sync with his mostly traditional paintings.

Closer examination reveals that his adoption of a video camera in exchange for a paintbrush is simply an expansion of Whitehouse's fascination with landscape, allowing him to keep his eye on one view over time and to present this view in real time to us.

Various videos include wind in bare trees, a daylong view of a serene lake and a 24-hour record of one day in Central Park. These videos challenge us to see the world around us through the abstracted eye of the artist, tricking us into a kind of mediation. We see changing light and the movement of small parts of the whole. By focusing on a single scene, we pass through novelty and then through boredom until we reach a state where we become entranced by the world's infinite complexity.

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Time Out Chicago / Issue 118: May 31–June 6, 2007

Review by Lauren Weinberg

“Revolution,” Alfedena Gallery, through Sat., June 2.

Ben Whitehouse has found an outlet for his shameful addiction to representational landscapes.

Since 2004, the English-born Chicago artist has channeled his forbidden love of plein air into abstract oil paintings and digital videos that emphasize the cyclical rhythms of nature, with appealing—albeit repetitious—results. The transition in Whitehouse’s work begins with March. Every morning during March 2004, the artist completed one painting of Lake Michigan from the same vantage point at Leone Park Beach, yielding 31 small panels that he arranged like a page from a calendar. Each individual painting is a gorgeous yet conventional depiction of sky and water; seen as an ensemble, they reveal the slow changes in our environment that most of us never notice. Lake Michigan is also the subject of 2006 Horizons—two discrete colored panels that seem suspended in the air: The top panel represents the light above the lake and the bottom panel represents that light reflected in the water. Despite their innovative construction, their sameness ultimately undermines their charm. Whitehouse’s abstract paintings have intriguing underlying concepts—such as Watch Over Time, which records the shifting colors in the sky over a 24-hour period—but his videos are the most compelling works in the show. Revolution North Bar Lake allows the viewer to contemplate the Michigan lake for 24 hours while providing a soothing soundtrack of birds, insects and waves. The beauty of nature may not be an original subject, but it evokes an intense response.—Lauren Weinberg

March detail