We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Whitney Gardner a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Whitney, appreciate you joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
I knew I wanted to pursue a creative career at a young age. I was in high school when I started to consider the option of being a professional artist and started to dream what that would look like for me. I took the steps that made sense to me at the time, and put myself through art school with the help of scholarships and grants. In 2010 I graduated from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, with BFA. Once I was out of school, I moved to the Mojave desert where I could begin to pursue a career as a painter with lower overhead, rather than staying in the city and struggling to support myself. For years while living in Twentynine Palms, renovating a jackrabbit homestead and selling vintage clothing online for income, I got off my path as a painter. I didn’t feel fulfilled and had a strong calling to get back to my original plan and be a full time artist. So I gave it everything I had, and declared that I didn’t care if I died in rags, as long as I had brushes in my hand.
Whitney, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am an oil painter born and based in Southern California. With a focus in painting landscapes about the Southwest, I am interested to expand the barriers of western art to the deserts of the far west in which I call home. Residing in the Mojave desert for 13 years, a fascination with the rugged scenery has led me into an artful study of this region. From plein air to studio rendered compositions, my paintings are an ode to the remarkable facets of the desert, such as fleeting cloud formations, nocturnal cactus blooms, and colors the desert summons at sunset. Being representational, my work is best described as naturalistic. I am interested in making a painting look genuine and believable to how the landscape appears to me in life.
Most of my work is created in the studio with original reference material of photos and studies created on site. I paint plein air to study the natural values, light, and shapes of the landscape, which informs my understanding of the subject while working in the studio. Living in a place where I am surrounded in nature, whether it be out my front door, hiking the desert hills nearby, or painting at my local National Park, allows to me to acutely absorb my surroundings by witnessing the natural phenomenon that takes place all year long, with the changing of weather and seasons. I also value traveling to other deserts outside my home, such as the Sonoran desert of Arizona, where I will spend days camping and plein air painting to learn the different colors, flora, and moods of this biome. In this way, when I’m at my easel rendering the character of a place, I try to present more than my visual memory, but also the feeling or sensation of the physical experience of standing within the landscape.
In my practice, I explore the truth and purity of the wilderness. It is timeless and perfect. I am humbled by rendering its beauty, and hope to share an experience with viewers by creating intimate scenes of a vast land.
In 2010, freshly out of art school, I moved to the Mojave desert. I had been living in in Oakland while attending California College of the Arts and was tired of the fast paced city life. With student debt looming, I knew I needed to find a place to live where I could have lower overhead, so that I could pursue my practice as a painter and find my way into the career as an artist. I searched on craigslist and found I could rent a house in Joshua Tree for $600 a month. That’s about as much a I was renting only a room in East Oakland. I had just got my tax return that was exactly that amount and moved to the desert with only $600 to my name. All I owned was a few crates of records, a few boxes of books, and a stack of new paintings.
Joshua Tree was not a foreign place to me since I grew up in Southern California and frequented Joshua Tree National Park through out my childhood. My Grandparents would take my siblings and I to Joshua Tree and the surrounding areas in the Mojave desert to hike, camp, shoot guns and explore. My Grandfather was a rock climber, mountain man, boy scout leader, and I think he wanted us to appreciate the outdoors as he did. He taught us stewardship of the land, about various plants and animals, and basic survival skills. When I decided to move to this landscape, I was riding on the fumes of these childhood memories and felt it was the perfect place to slide into a slower pace life and focus on my work.
Of course, in 2010 the country was in a recession. I didn’t have a plan, and living in the desert where jobs were scarce, I took up a job at the local saloon. I hustled burgers and beers for tips and on my days off, I painted. Over the years, living in such a rugged and beautiful environment, I began to really see, observe, and understand the desert. And slowly, the desert made its way into my paintings. One day I just had an epiphany that the desert was all I wanted to paint. I had a strong calling to study and learn the moods of the desert in every way, and as a result, I became a landscape painter. I became determined to develop my skill, so I built a tiny studio on my property and studied the desert around me though my brushes.
In 2019 I joined my local Twentynine Palms Art Gallery and submitted a few small pieces of desert landscapes. My new work was well received, and sold quickly. Months later I submitted a painting to the Joshua Tree National Park Exposition, and was awarded Best of Show for my painting Ocotillo Sky, which was a landscape of an Ocotillo with mountains. I felt encouraged, so I applied to have a solo show at the Twentynine Palms Art Gallery and was accepted. I worked for months to prepare new work for my show and ended the year with a solo show in my home town. Three works sold before opening night, and I knew I was on the right path.
Somewhere in my journey of developing my voice as a landscape painter, I discovered a resurgence happening in Western Art. I had not been aware that there were so many well established, and young and up-coming artists, making work about the west. I had associated that market to the time of Fredrick Remington and Charles Russell. I was incredibly inspired by the contemporary work I was seeing in this genre, and I felt my paintings could have a unique home amongst painters depicting Native Americans, cowboys, horses, wildlife, and landscape. I was very attracted to southwestern landscapes I was seeing from these western artists, yet most were of Arizona and New Mexico, and I thought I had something to say in that conversation with my paintings of the far west, of California. I didn’t feel that the Mojave was represented widely within the Western art genre.
Knowing the market I wanted to jump into and the collectors I wanted to reach, I began showing my work in western art shows. Over the last few years I have had tremendous opportunity in showing at a wide variety of notable western shows through out the country. It will be my third year exhibiting at the prestigious, National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. I am also now represented by notable galleries, such as Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, AZ and McLarry Fine Art Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. These galleries house works from some of my hero painters that I looked up to at the vey beginning of my journey as a western painter. Now to share the same walls with these artists is an absolute dream come true.
I didn’t think I would get to this point in my career so fast. I am also shocked and incredibly thankful for the response to my work in recent years. Between the art shows and the galleries I exhibit in, I am working constantly to keeping up with the demand. I have had many sell out shows, and most the time, my work sells at my galleries as soon as they receive it. My collectors and audience is growing rapidly and it is all very exciting.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
From my own journey as a painter, what shows my resilience are the ways I have accepted failure. It is a constant struggle to develop skill and technique and sometimes paintings don’t go as planned. I have spent days and weeks on pieces that just never develop, and are scraped off, wiped out and thrown away. It is hard to accept lost time and material, but I feel I learn from every mistake and every minute put into my craft whether the painting is successful or not.
Also, the climb to be noticed in the art world definitely asked for my resilience and patience. In the beginning I was not accepted into every show I applied to. Receiving a rejection letter is a bit of a let down. But I kept trying, and applied to the same shows that rejected me year after year. And as not be discouraged, I even applied to shows that were higher ranking and more well known then the shows that rejected me, to my surprise, I was accepted my the more prestigious exhibitions.
Another side of resilience I have proven to myself is keeping with my practice even if it means not making money. I pushed through without a living wage for years as a full time artist. I learned early in life how to get by without needing much, and I flexed that sensibility to build my skill and name. My time behind the easel is much more valuable to me than any time spent on someone else’s payroll. Now my income is building year by year because I made the initial effort to give my craft 100% of my time.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Though my social media following is a humble number, and though I only participate on Instagram, the platform has been such a helpful tool. I have directly connected with collectors, magazines, galleries, and other artists that have all delivered positive opportunities for my career. I have a very vibrant and fun community of followers that make sharing my work rewarding and inspiring. It has been a slow and steady process in growing this audience, and for me, that audience is all quality rather than quantity. I think the audience was built from my genuine authenticity with what I share. It is curated to be everything art and desert lifestyle centered, but in fact, all the content is truly the life I live. I share clips of my studio, my process, my sketchbook, my hikes, wondering around the desert with my dog, art shows, camping trips, road trips and poetry all paired with a soundtrack that is genuinely the music I have been listening to that day. I don’t follow fads in my posts, like turning around slowly to reveal a new painting in my hands, or using popular inspirational audio clips in my reals. I try to let my profile reflect me and my work as much as possible. Also, I take pride in responding graciously to every person who reaches out to comment on a post or write a direct message. If they take the time engage with me, I take the time to engage with them and let them know I appreciate their interest.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.whitofthewest.com
- Instagram: @whitneyg.art
Image Credits
Ricardo Asthenia