What if This?

60SIX presents “What if This?”, an exhibition of paintings by Brent Willson and Peter Whitehead. The artists are multi-disciplinary in their approach to creating, each being a musician, poet and painter.

Willson’s new series of paintings integrates a wide variety of mark-making. He often draws with paint or oil stick. Geometric shapes, small semi abstract pictorial drawings, and sometimes graffiti chance tags appear on canvas or wood in a cacophony of intuitively composed pictures. The recent work reflects Willson’s current engagement in assisting Michael Jang in his street art projects. A mission school “non precious” vibe is implicit in the use of found wood and house paint and the artist’s vocabulary is both nuanced and personal. A repeating symbol the artist calls “fissure” is made of intersecting bright colors overlaid with lines echoing lines on the palm of our hands, perhaps questioning our future. Other pictorial icons look like creatures. He calls them “cyber-morphic…A mash-up of sea creatures and robots.”

British artist Peter Whitehead has lived and worked in the US since 1975, exploring visual arts, song writing and experimental music. Here Whitehead presents paintings, sculpture and journals. His paintings are constructed with the most elemental visual forms: diagonal, horizontal and vertical lines. He composes these fundamentals into harmonious sequences: Dense layered stripes, airy open stripes, lines made of protruding sticks, drips and strokes of color striking open space. His predominant formal element of line takes on a new dimension in a sculpture called “14 Gallons” . It uses found objects in a poetic assemblage which quietly, in it’s economy of means, speaks “gallons.”