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  Grant Gilmore Whipple

Grant Gilmore Whipple

Assistant Teaching Professor

831-502-0265

 

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Arts Division

Art Department

Assistant Teaching Professor

Faculty

Regular Faculty

Visual Arts

Elena Baskin Building H
H-11

Please email me to set up an office hours meeting in person or on zoom for anything to discuss related to the course. After the last class of the week I can usually meet as well, just let me know.

Art Department

Grant Whipple's new paintings fragment the routines of daily life to bring overlooked contrasts into high relief. An elite university encroaches on a low-income community. Ecological crisis creeps its way in to the comforts of home. Tourists seeking leisure find a 21st-century world rearranged beyond comprehension. Born in Chicago, he received his BA from DePauw University and an MFA from Michigan State University. He exhibits in galleries locallly, nationally, and internationally. Currently Grant lives in Santa Cruz, California, where he teaches drawing and painting at UC Santa Cruz.

In my most recent narrative paintings, I combine representational and abstract visual languages to bring everyday contrasts into high relief. This work explores how technology, economic flows, and waste create increasingly heterogeneous spaces in the twenty-first century. I work in both large and small formats, from 6’ x 8’ canvases to 9” x 12” panels.

My paintings begin as broad conceptual ideas such as contaminants infiltrating supposedly pure water sources. I merge studies based on a wide variety of source materials, including direct observation, digital images, and scientific models with spontaneous and experimental mark making. Contrasts are further emphasized through mixed media and technique. In “Moire Cloud,” mechanical patterning over densely textured paint and turbulent colors depicts non- representational clusters of Amazonian ecology. Floating on the surface of that background, a neatly rendered steamboat transports fine wood to international markets. Color choices parallel technical oppositions and serve to draw attention to the discomfort of incongruities. “The Peripatetics of Hopkins and Greenmount” depicts the neoclassical columns of an elite university in warm hues mirrored by abandoned row houses in the negative inversion of those colors.

Inspired by the stream of differences observed during early experiences of urban commuting and more recent domestic and international travel, my work dissolves boundaries often accentuated by contemporary uses of space. I dialogue with issues of fragmentation and collage from contemporary art. Paintings become catalysts for viewers’ reflections on how these ideas operate in their lives. The visual density of my work requires a detained consideration in order to unravel uncommon intersections. The motif of visual contrasts is sufficiently rich to allow me to engage with the urgent themes of globalization, technology domination, and ecological crisis while creating narratives that find their way in and out of modern problems.

Drawing, Painting, Perceptual and Conceptual Practices, Digital Intersections with drawing and painting.

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