Contributed by Patrick Neal / Cecilia Whittaker-Doe’s current show at the Interchurch Center on the Upper West Side, comprising close to 50 works, sheds generous light on her process, range and subject matter. The exhibition’s title, “Beneath the Trees it Rains,” conveys the dynamism of Whittaker-Doe’s landscapes, which demonstrate nature’s seasonal abundance and power. She favors a more-is-more approach, wielding a variety of mark-making techniques – sponging, pooling, drybrush, scratching, and stippling — via media such as ink, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, colored-pencil, oilstick, and oil paint over prepared paper, linen, birch and Sintra panels. Her tiered and compartmentalized approach to composition manages to be both spatial and flat. The viewer moves from foreground to background or across patches of activity in congested tangles, as different motifs evoke specific places while serving as open receptors.
A space is frequently anchored by tree trunks cropped close or tightly rendered flowers, and stylized raindrops recur throughout as tears and waves. Interlocking rock formations resemble stacked walls or dry riverbeds, while waterways and paths run up, down and sideways. Root systems dance along shorelines and hug clusters of boulders as speckled foliage peers through the underbrush. Notational contour lines give tree branches a wispy, spectral presence. What the Rains Made for Audrey Flack registers the busy opulence and delight in veneer and luster found in the eponymous photorealist painter. Earlier in her career, Whittaker-Doe applied patinas to the sculptures of Nancy Graves, among others, and an appreciation remains for the wonder and eclecticism of Graves’s open-form, tree-like assemblages.
Whittaker-Doe counts among her influences Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, František Kupka, and Odilon Redon. Indeed, her work does carry some of the colorful exaggeration and heart-on-your-sleeve poignancy of German Expressionism. Like Vera Iliatova among her contemporaries, she creates comprehensively rangy settings. Her paintings also share a carefree playfulness and figure-ground upheaval with Pattern and Decoration artist Robert Kushner’s works. In a palette of blue and green, Nourished is a poetic blend of representation and abstraction that elevates earth, air, water, and sky, echoed in Awakening Without Words, where two trees in phthalo blue and turquoise hug each other in a clearing that writhes with life.
Redon’s influence is evident in works such as Like One Body, with its sobering orange ground, and Certain Trees, in which branches are limned in hot pink, and the silhouette of trees moonlit and flattened in black and white. A soft violet haze bathes the small painting Clear Climb, bringing to mind Redon’s hazy vistas before dissolving into reverie. On Our Way Home reflects a cluster of styles, a central purple iris embracing a craggy trunk while etched and feathered marks invigorate a dancing woodland. Here colors are high-key and magnified as in Miraged, whose origami-like forms fold in and out of one another – nestling, settling, and entwining. Some works evoke Japanese Ukiyo-e (floating world) prints with their distant horizons and stylized waves, rain, and mountains. Others explode into thick webs of paint like a Joan Mitchell or Sam Francis abstraction. The hot reds and oranges and thick impasto of Rain Expected suggest garden and climate as Mitchell’s Petit Matin series does.
Other works in “Beneath the Trees it Rains” bear enticing titles like If You Want My Love, Reason For Living, and Speculation at the Edge of the Woods. Taken together, the words and pictures are tantalizingly portentous. Whittaker-Doe successfully balances spatial illusion with fidelity to materials, reveling in the plasticity of art and its history with impressive technical prowess and a powerful imagination.
“Cecilia Whittaker-Doe, Beneath the Trees it Rains,” The Galleries of the Interchurch Center, 61 Claremont Avenue, New York, NY 10027. Through September 5, 2025. Update: The show has been extended to September 19, 2025.
About the author: Patrick Neal is a 2018 NYFA Artist Fellow in Painting and received a 2024 Queens Art Fund New Work Grant. Current exhibitions include In Bloom at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, Basel, Switzerland, through August 31, and Pushing Boundaries at Garvey Simon Gallery, New York, NY, through October 12. Neal is a co-host of Show&Tell, a lecture series at the New York Irish Center in Queens.
Cecilia Whittaker-Doe’s paintings are wonderful and glow on the walls. It was impossible to favor one over another.
Patrick Neal’s review give them justice. And a favorite is presented — Certain trees, 2021.
Thank you Norma for your comment. I appreciate it! And thank you for mentioning Certain Trees, that drawing is distinctive in the group.