Transmission Transform, 2014

2013-14, Collaborative Project with
Photographer Dylan Forsberg
for Transmission Magazine

Transmission Transparency, 2013

Transmission series by the artist Emerald Whipple is a collaborative project with photographer Dylan Forsberg for Transmission Magazine. The exhibition itself is a representation of the transitional period from youth into adulthood and from winter to spring. It represents a meditation on the greatest form of art, which is life.

An inordinate amount of visual data is anchored in these large-scale oil paintings. There is an extreme depth of stylization and detail suffocating the atmosphere while meticulously filling the empty space. The tendency of compartmentalization is mitigated by the artist’s use of pointillist brushwork that produces an image built from thousands of tiny polychromatic units conforming to a tight grid. The pixels are often distinct from their adjacent counterparts; though in some areas of the painting they are allowed to overlap and blend so that a sense of blurring occurs. All but few dots are kept distinct thus allowing for a neater framework and a flattening of the image. Some individual dots have been modified by the superimposition of other smaller brushstrokes. These devices, especially the use of smaller dots to modify the larger dots, allow the portraits to have a ubiquitous quality that negates the expected dialogue between the figure and the foreground. By further refining and expanding the evolution of pointillism, the art stipulates that each pixel underlines the artist’s intention - to produce an experience vitalized by thousands of dots variegated in color.

The minuscule proportion of the grid in relation to the enormity of the canvas maximizes the work’s textural density. As a result, the image attains distinctly photographic elegance when seen from afar. Seen up close however, the viewer is dissolved into assessing thousands of tiny nonfigurative elements organized according to a fleeting though self-sufficient logic. Through this balance, recalling the melding duality of reality and perception, the artist confidently calls on the viewer to fully employ his or her faculties as a participant while never loosing sight of the fact that the lens has intervened in the process.

Unrelenting in its composition and richly inhabited by pigment, the sequence of colors is now ready to fulfill its role in the evolving mosaic of light. Oversaturated day glow oil paint, superimposed in transparent layers, lends resolve to the development of a scared vibration. Increased flexibility in paint handling encourages the artist to introduce an emotional quality evident in each brushstroke. Working from warm to cool, transparent to opaque, a series of artistic maneuvers brings the intention incrementally nearer to the goal. Concentrations and bits of chromatic information modifying adjacent squares, and in turn being modified by them, the pixels indulging in simultaneous obscurity and grandeur ravish the eye and infect their obsessive values on the very tradition of pointillism and impressionism itself.