C O L L E C T I V E G A L L E R Y

REPRESENTED ARTISTS

KIRSTY WHITEN

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PRESS RELEASE

There are many things that teenage boys do in the seclusion of their bedrooms. Some you may know about, and no doubt don’t want to be reminded of. Others may be less familiar. One of their well-practiced arts rarely granted the approving sanction of mentors and anthropologists is that of pencil shading. Just to be discriminating this isn’t just any kind of free form, expressionist nautiness with a pencil. No the teenage boy is the samurai of shading. For the practitioner of this noble art, the overlapping layers of different grades of pencil, intermeshing and interweaving are a patchwork of infinite beauty. They possess a logic and structure immune to the discriminating palette of tutors. They are the culmination of strenuous afternoons obsessively rubbing the point of their lead pencils into smooth domes. The choice of imagery is often secondary; it could be a deadpan self-portrait in a tracksuit, German troops storming Stalingrad or simply a car. What matters is the thrill of repetitive action leading ever onwards to a satisfactory slice of realism.

Kirsty Whiten is not a teenage boy. But she freely admits she could be one. While for many of us the hormone hell of adolescence remains forever blurry, yet naggingly painful, whiten has managed to keep in touch with this lost world.

Somehow she has managed to transcendentally inhabit the pimpled skin of the universal teenage boy.Firstly this has allowed her to discover the mysterious, secret arts of shading. Her drawings are virtuosi in their utilization of this neglected art. Whether it’s in her rendering of the creases on the hot pants of typically gawky, greasy haired girl, or her fidelity and detail in capturing the surface of a lizard, Whiten’s work enjoyably demonstrates that when it comes to wielding lead, she’s more than capable of pummeling any rivals.

Secondly, and most importantly her perverse projection into the hot house hell of horny, yet painfully sensitive adolescence has put her in touch with a sensibility and perception perhaps as lost and forgotten to the mature adult as the joys of shading. In Whitens pictures the intense, acute awareness of the teenage returns, but this time refracted through the adult lens. Just as the developing consciousness of the teenager constantly finds itself shocked and terrorized by the inexplicable horrors of everyday life, so Whiten’s work is riddled with images of distorted, often grotesque visions of human matter.Never get out of the bedroom.

Never get out of the bedroom.

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