Artist Statement
Whitelock’s imagery ranges from what might be described as bucolic - trees, flowers, landscapes - to the disquieting and abstract; natural forms give way to sudden compositional breaks and brightly painted foregrounds tail off into sombre horizons and densely layered surfaces. These painterly interventions allow him to realise and dissect lived experiences into material forms, each composition becoming a vessel to hold certain psychologies - a painting that is initially rooted in grief, doubts, fears and curiosities, oscillates to something that instead embodies notions of growth, disruption, repair, hope and resilience. This duality of painting is what keeps its vitality, in its multiple states of transformation. Forever evolving but without a necessity to become something more.
Working at various scale and forms, his process unrestricted by premeditated design, each work is an act of rewiring and discovering new patterns, mysteries, processes and memories. Whitelock considers his process to be one of unearthing, by which an artifact emerges with its own life and time. This process allows the work to be a symptom of whatever face he is wearing in the moment of applying paint to a surface, imbuing each work with a sense of history, immediacy and drama.
"I like to use wood ash in my paintings as something at the final stage of what a material can become, signifying the end of a transformation, there is no further
point than dust. However, also being a fertiliser and component for life and growth. This duality of the material is what I'm interested in, as a catalyst for morality, loss,
change, renewal and growth. I hope to create a sense of stillness that's intertwined within our forever changing landscapes."
