Spending time with Elizabeth Whelan sets your brain afire about how she thinks, sees, and her ever-evolving creative process.
The breadth of her prolific art and art endeavors is vast. And Whelan’s adventurous spirit runs throughout, even into the story of how she became a fine art artist in the first place.
For 20 years she worked as a self-taught graphic designer and illustrator, gaining an education through her own initiative and on-the-job training. When Whelan and her husband first moved to the Island in 2006, she worked freelance, including with The Martha’s Vineyard Times, until she opened her own graphic design business at Five Corners in 2008. Her graphic design business flourished, but the paintbrush beckoned.
Although she had never worked in oils, a new business hired her to paint three large works for their store. “I said, ‘Sure.’ I thought, ‘How hard could it be?’” As a graphic designer, Whelan understood the principles behind painting, having worked with gouache and watercolor: “I had so much fun — that energy you feel when painting and getting into the flow. I decided I needed to understand how that worked.”
Her self-directed painting apprenticeship began in 2010. Whelan was drawn to portraiture, and developed what became her first signature style — exquisitely detailed, realistic renderings that convey the sitter’s very essence: “I fell in love with the challenge of bringing a person’s personality out. It’s difficult to do, and I enjoyed that.”
In 2011, Whelan began taking portrait commissions. She prefers to start the process by meeting with the client, engaging in conversation, and taking photographs. “All of that plays like a video in my head while painting. If I don’t see you in person, I can get a flat, painted rendition of a flat photo.”
Throughout the two- to six-month process, Whelan interweaves moments to check in with a client. She completes a small black graphite and white charcoal pencil sketch on toned paper, and a color study in oil or acrylics on a small canvas, to show the person. “It gives them a chance to weigh in. Sometimes a client will see something I did not.” For instance, one client wanted her to straighten his tie, which she hadn’t realized was crooked.
Over time, Whelan expanded her subject matter to still lives, landscapes, and marine scenes, but in 2020, she began to paint large, in-depth botanicals. It started as a way to explore the physiological workings of how people see things differently.
“It’s because our DNA is different from one another, and therefore, the mechanism within our eye that sends that information to our brain will be different. This is why artists’ styles, color palettes, and interests vary. “
At the same time, Whelan became interested in how everything around us is integrated. “The same elements in us are in the plants and the air we breathe. We are not apart from nature, but a part of it, because we join at the atomic level with everything around us.”
Inspired by these thoughts, Whelan started exploring how to convey a sense of a time and place, using looser brushstrokes along with areas of greater precision: “It’s about how I actually see. When I’m out walking around the Island, sometimes I stop and look at something intensely, and analyze how beautiful it is in detail. But sometimes, I’m just walking by and getting an impression.”
She continues, “Detail is what I like to go for. I’ve been working on what happens when I just stop at the impression of a scene. Am I happy with that? Is it enough to speak to what I saw? Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. In the meantime, I’ve learned a lot.”
Whelan reflects on the growing range of her art, “It’s been 14 years to figure out what to paint and why. I had to wait for my interests to bubble up, and develop the technical facility to carry each off. I make myself do what I tell my students: Experiment, be willing to try new things, think about how we see and experience the world, and then determine how to show that in paint.”
In addition to commissions and her own art, Whelan has a dizzying number of other endeavors.
She teaches, primarily focusing on the novice: “This business of getting people into drawing is really important to me. It is something I try to do on a community level.” For instance, Whelan did this online during the pandemic, and has made those into art drawing classes available on YouTube with some 59 episodes.
She says, “I’m very keen on drawing people in. Almost all of us sketched as kids. Somewhere along the line, we got divided into artists and not artists, and I want everybody to know that they can have fun. You don’t have to show it to anyone. I have sketchbooks full of drawings I don’t show anyone.”
Whelan aims to keep these classes playful and low-stakes. She focuses on how you set up a scene: “Composition and the dark and light balance are key to all that. If you just learn to draw isolated objects, it takes a while to learn how to put them together. I rather start with the idea of what a good composition looks like. Then we can work on how well you are drawing that coffee cup.”
Over the past three winters, Whelan has also offered a 6:30 am “Grab a Pencil Breakfast Club.” A loyal following of 20 to 30 people join her online for a live webcam feed, sketching from somewhere in the world. She enjoys how it simulates the experience of drawing out of doors and learning to work with the challenge of changing light.
This spring, Whelan and artist Adrianna Eftimie created and hosted a delightful, slightly irreverent, upbeat, and educational 12-episode streaming show, “Art Adventures.” From thefts to secret codes and hidden meanings, each half-hour episode begins with an amusing skit in which the two bungle some interpretation of the topic before delving into the theme during the main segment. Through lively conversation, they share engaging information, intriguing stories, and opinions.
Ever industrious, Whelan also has two upcoming exhibitions scheduled, and an online course for professionals in the works.
Asked about how she balances everything on her plate, Whelan refers to having learned from advocating for her brother, Paul Whelan, who was held hostage in Russia from 2018 until August 1 this year. Recently, a State Department official told her that she was an example of post-traumatic gain rather than post-traumatic stress.
“I had this terrible thing to deal with on my brother’s account, but I learned and grew from it rather than letting it take me down. There are things I could and could not make the government do. You also want the public to like your work, buy it, and say nice things. I’ve had to learn not to give into the drama of whatever the situation is, but to start with a big idea and then boil it down to what I can realistically do, and then be satisfied with an outcome of completion. It was the same with my brother. I couldn’t get him out by myself. Success was making sure the very top people were working on it. I have to decide what success realistically looks like for each one of my projects.”
So far, there isn’t one that hasn’t hit the mark.
View Elizabeth Whelan’s work at elizabeth-whelan.com, and watch Whelan’s “Art Adventures” at bit.ly/YT_WhalenArtist and bit.ly/YT_ArtAdventures.
