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A CHRISTOPHER WHITBY PRIMER
A CHRISTOPHER WHITBY PRIMER
96" x 176"
Drawing panels: 96" x 48" each
Gesso, acrylic, paper, hemp, wood maché, vellum
Sculpture: 77" x 24" x 24"
Modeling stand, metal, wood, wood maché, vellum, hemp, modeling paste, acrylic
While teaching at the La Jolla Art Center (now the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art) Robert Cremean would often see the young son of his landlady playing in the yard, most often riding his hobby horse. The image of the child equestrian was indelible in the imagination of the artist who first depicted him in sculpture in 1958 and again in 1960. The child on the hobbyhorse appeared repeatedly thereafter both in individual works and as a detail within much larger and more comprehensive studio sections. These depictions were done in wood maché, wood mortise, carved wood, graphite drawings, modeling paste relief, gesso and in bronze. The most extensive examination of Christopher Whitby was in THE CHRISTOPHER WHITBY COLORING BOOK, 1990-1993.
In this final portrayal, many of the metaphorical images depicted and analyzed by the artist during the whole of the fifty-five year ride of the ever-young but spiritually and intellectually maturing equestrian are once more revisited. It appears that his and his horse’s expressions have radically changed, as if the events confronted and experienced while riding through that ever-present “valley of astonishment,” contemplated by the artist decades earlier, have at last been fully internalized. He remains a child but no longer is he naive.
Numerous questions arise when viewing this depiction: could it really be a self-portrait of the artist whose memories are so clearly made manifest in the drawings on the two wall panels?; through time and sexual awakening and diminishment, exactly whose passage was it?; have the artist and the equestrian finally become one in which the boy is becoming the horse and the horse the boy and the boy a man?; does the amorphous naiveté of the child of first view metamorphose into the startled cognizance of the second view, the horse reacting with startled and rearing anger and the equestrian of the third view resigned?; have the equestrian and the horse finally become one both actually and sexually?; do the panels serve as a defining retrospective of so many of the ideas and events and thoughts through which the horse and rider have ridden? And is A Christopher Whitby Primer further evidence that the entire STUDIO SECTION 2009-2015 is, in fact, a multi-faceted retrospective of the artist’s work and his own abbreviated autobiography?
A CHRISTOPHER WHITBY PRIMER
A CHRISTOPHER WHITBY PRIMER
96" x 176"
Drawing panels: 96" x 48" each
Gesso, acrylic, paper, hemp, wood maché, vellum
Sculpture: 77" x 24" x 24"
Modeling stand, metal, wood, wood maché, vellum, hemp, modeling paste, acrylic
While teaching at the La Jolla Art Center (now the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art) Robert Cremean would often see the young son of his landlady playing in the yard, most often riding his hobby horse. The image of the child equestrian was indelible in the imagination of the artist who first depicted him in sculpture in 1958 and again in 1960. The child on the hobbyhorse appeared repeatedly thereafter both in individual works and as a detail within much larger and more comprehensive studio sections. These depictions were done in wood maché, wood mortise, carved wood, graphite drawings, modeling paste relief, gesso and in bronze. The most extensive examination of Christopher Whitby was in THE CHRISTOPHER WHITBY COLORING BOOK, 1990-1993.
In this final portrayal, many of the metaphorical images depicted and analyzed by the artist during the whole of the fifty-five year ride of the ever-young but spiritually and intellectually maturing equestrian are once more revisited. It appears that his and his horse’s expressions have radically changed, as if the events confronted and experienced while riding through that ever-present “valley of astonishment,” contemplated by the artist decades earlier, have at last been fully internalized. He remains a child but no longer is he naive.
Numerous questions arise when viewing this depiction: could it really be a self-portrait of the artist whose memories are so clearly made manifest in the drawings on the two wall panels?; through time and sexual awakening and diminishment, exactly whose passage was it?; have the artist and the equestrian finally become one in which the boy is becoming the horse and the horse the boy and the boy a man?; does the amorphous naiveté of the child of first view metamorphose into the startled cognizance of the second view, the horse reacting with startled and rearing anger and the equestrian of the third view resigned?; have the equestrian and the horse finally become one both actually and sexually?; do the panels serve as a defining retrospective of so many of the ideas and events and thoughts through which the horse and rider have ridden? And is A Christopher Whitby Primer further evidence that the entire STUDIO SECTION 2009-2015 is, in fact, a multi-faceted retrospective of the artist’s work and his own abbreviated autobiography?