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MS. RIEDEL: From Michigan?

MR. MONTEITH: From Michigan—from Michigan State, from Lansing, the middle of the state, all the way to Boston and all the way back on a weekend.

MS. RIEDEL: Is this ‘60s, ‘70s?

MR. MONTEITH: Yes, it’s the ‘60s, yeah.

MS. RIEDEL: Yes.

…

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Thoughts after the William de Kooning show at the Art Institute of Chicago

I left the de Kooning show at the Art Institute of Chicago thinking about repeatability. How does an artist repeat a specific urgency, freedom, or looseness? And how do those qualities become concentrated enough to sustain contemplation?

Urgency gives an action necessity: something has to happen. Freedom allows you to follow it without knowing its destination. Looseness leaves room for adjustment, accident, and unexpected relationships. Together, they can get a work moving before you fully understand what you’re doing. Understanding comes through making.

But a compelling event creates a problem: how do you return to it?

You can repeat the outward movement of your hand, yet the movement may no longer have the same necessity. What was a discovery can become a familiar manner. A gesture that once opened possibilities can become a shortcut to a recognizable result.

That makes repeatability an artistic problem as much as a technical achievement. What are we trying to recover—the shape, the intensity, the openness, or the possibility of discovering something again?

Perhaps what becomes repeatable is a way of attending. Familiarity with materials allows you to stay responsive while working freely. Experience helps you recognize a possibility quickly and remain with it. You begin to sense when to follow a mark, when to interrupt it, and when to leave it alone.

Looseness can carry considerable precision. A mark may be irregular while its placement, weight, and relationship to another mark are exact. Its freedom exists within those relationships. Move it slightly, change its thickness, or close the space beside it, and the whole passage may feel different.

My mother, Eve Whitaker, made Two People, Books and Pen with the two figures based on her and me…I think, if adjacently. Looking at the painting now, I see more than a double portrait. I see an image of our artistic relationship—and perhaps something about what it means for one artist to raise another.

The body language is important. My mother sits on the left, her head resting heavily against her hand. She is still and observant. Her attention seems directed toward me. I occupy more of the foreground, leaning across the table, but I am looking somewhere else.

That creates a quiet movement through the painting: mother to son to something outside the picture.

Between and beneath us are books, papers and a pen. They suggest knowledge, writing, education and artistic tradition—the accumulated material one generation can give another. Yet neither of us is actually looking at them. They are simply there, part of the environment we share.

I think that distinction matters.

My mother did not teach me to make her work. She gave me a place in which making art was ordinary and serious. Art was something people did, argued about, studied and continued doing over a lifetime. The materials on the table could therefore be understood less as instructions than as an inheritance.

The painting also contains an interesting reversal. My mother is the older artist, but she is not shown instructing me. She watches. Her dark clothing pulls her somewhat into the background while my yellow shirt pushes forward into the light. I am physically closer to the books and papers, but my attention has already moved elsewhere.

There is no triumph in that movement. My expression is uncertain and absorbed. Artistic inheritance can be a gift, but it can also present a problem: What are you supposed to do with everything you have been given?

Our work eventually moved in markedly different directions. My mother’s work often concentrates on human relationships and emotional interactions through figures—the ways people watch, hold, confront, protect or withdraw from one another. My own work has increasingly dispersed those relationships across drawing, text, musical notation and systems.

Seen retrospectively, Two People, Books and Pen seems almost to anticipate that divergence.

She is looking at the relationship.

I am looking beyond it.

That does not mean rejecting what came before. Quite the opposite. The books and pen remain on the table. The inheritance remains present. But inheritance between artists does not have to mean stylistic imitation. Perhaps its more important function is to provide something solid enough to depart from.

I cannot know exactly what my mother intended the painting to say about us. But looking at it now, I find a possibility that feels true:

I gave you a place inside an artistic inheritance. I watch you closely, but I do not expect you to become me. The books, images and tools are between us and belong to both of us. What you make from them is yours.

For a family of artists, that may be one of the most important forms of inheritance: not the transmission of a style, but the permission to continue differently.

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Solomon’s work feels like an inheritor or reinterpretation of Eve’s rather than a direct stylistic imitation. Both organize crowded social space through compression, angular figuration, and psychological tension, but they diverge sharply in how they handle structure, temporality, and atmosphere.

Eve’s bar/interior scene operates through mass and gravity. The figures are compressed into the foreground almost sculpturally. Faces are elongated and exhausted; hands become oversized emotional instruments. The palette is earthen and nicotine-stained: reds, ochres, browns, dirty blues. Everything feels heavy, fixed, and trapped inside social ritual. The composition pushes inward toward psychic pressure. Even the background crowd reads like a rising wall of noise and intoxication. The painting belongs to a lineage of social expressionism concerned with barroom alienation, urban fatigue, and collective loneliness.

Solomon’s work translates some of those same emotional conditions into a much more fluid, distributed, intermedia language.

Eve’s work is centripetal. Solomon’s is centrifugal.

Eve locks bodies together into dense emotional knots. Solomon disperses energy across the surface like signal traffic or musical notation. Figures drift in and out of legibility. Instead of sculptural weight, Solomon uses velocity and recurrence.

The most important structural difference is the role of systems.

In Solomon’s work, the typed poem, musical staff, repeated figures, color rhythms, and directional marks operate as simultaneous organizational systems. The crowd becomes a murmuration rather than a congregation. The bar is no longer simply a social setting; it becomes a score-space.

The inserted text panel radically changes the ontology of Solomon’s image. In Eve’s work, emotion is embodied primarily through facial and bodily distortion. In Solomon’s, language introduces another register of consciousness. The poem behaves almost like a pinned note, diary fragment, or conceptual anchor interrupting the swarm. Likewise, the musical strip at the bottom functions less illustratively than structurally: it stabilizes the composition horizontally while implying temporal sequencing.

Their handling of color is also fundamentally different. Eve uses color to deepen mood and corporeality. Solomon intentionally destabilizes local color through green skin, violet shadows, orange and red atmospheric flooding, and cyan interruptions. This creates perceptual flicker rather than psychological density. The eye cannot settle. This aligns closely with Solomon’s broader Murmurations logic: pattern accumulation under pressure.

One thing Eve’s work arguably does more powerfully is establish focal hierarchy. It has a brutal clarity about where emotional intensity resides. The central cluster—especially the pale male figure leaning upward—anchors the entire composition psychologically. Solomon sacrifices some of that singular emotional concentration for distributed movement and simultaneity.

What strengthens Solomon’s work considerably is that its apparent looseness is counterbalanced by embedded systems: typed cadence, notation, recurring gestures, directional movement, and chromatic repetition. Without those systems, the image could collapse into improvisational chaos. With them, it acquires an internal rhythm analogous to contemporary music composition or graphic scoring.

Thematically, both Eve and Solomon deal with collective states: intoxication, exhaustion, ritual gathering, social performance, and emotional estrangement. But Eve presents these primarily as existential and social conditions. Solomon presents them increasingly as flows—people becoming moving motifs within overlapping visual, textual, and musical systems.

The result is less tragic and more unstable: less fixed despair, more accelerated psychic weather.

Comparative Critique

The dialogue between Eve and Solomon becomes most interesting when the works are viewed not simply as expressionistic crowd scenes, but as two different solutions to the problem of picturing collective emotional experience.

Eve achieves force through condensation.

Solomon achieves force through circulation.

Eve’s Painting

Eve’s painting is psychologically oppressive in a highly controlled way. Nearly every formal decision reinforces entrapment: compressed foreground space, oversized hands, tilted heads, repetitive facial elongation, tightly packed bodies, and shallow depth.

The figures feel locked into proximity without intimacy. They are physically close but emotionally isolated. The bar setting becomes almost ecclesiastical—a place of ritualized despair.

One of the painting’s greatest strengths is its emotional concentration. The central figures operate like a chamber of pressure. The pale faces are modeled with enough anatomical solidity that their distortion feels consequential rather than decorative. Eve also understands how to vary density: dark crowd masses, pale facial planes, the warm table field, and punctuating bottle forms establish a strong compositional spine.

The limitation of this approach is that its symbolic vocabulary is comparatively concentrated. Once the emotional register of alienation, exhaustion, and intoxicated social theater is established, the painting largely remains within it. Its psychological temperature is sustained rather than elastic.

It is a powerful closed system.

Solomon’s Work

Solomon’s piece is structurally more dispersed and intermedial. It attempts to hold drawing, poetry, notation, crowd choreography, chromatic improvisation, and archival fragmentation within a single image field.

Its strongest aspect is the way the crowd behaves like distributed notation. Figures repeat almost as rhythmic units rather than fully individuated characters. Solomon is less concerned with portrait psychology than with energetic mapping.

The poem and musical staff are not merely collage elements; they alter the mechanism through which the image is read. The viewer oscillates between reading, scanning, internally hearing, and navigating spatial movement. That multimodal behavior is central to the work.

Color performs similarly complex labor. Rather than describing natural light, acidic greens, vibrating oranges, purples cutting through flesh, and unstable blues produce emotional interference patterns. The effect suggests multiple emotional moments occupying the same surface simultaneously.

Solomon’s work is strongest in its rhythmic surface intelligence, movement, integration of systems, atmosphere of psychic overflow, resistance to fixed focal hierarchy, and transformation of social space into score-space.

Seen together, Eve and Solomon are not simply making variations on the same kind of figurative painting. Eve compresses the social body until psychological pressure emerges from it. Solomon takes that social body and disperses it into rhythm, language, notation, repetition, and movement.

The connection is therefore not primarily stylistic. It is structural and familial: two artists using figuration to ask what happens to the individual when bodies, emotions, and social forces accumulate in the same field.

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In 2017 I went back to fundamentals. I brought out the compressed charcoal and paper and started making these square pieces that I always imagined as album covers or some sort of insert to a LP, with printed lyrics. I did in fact make two full length LP vinyls but the charcoal and music never fully vibed together so I temporarily abandoned the project. …

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During my mother’s residency in Hyde Park, Chicago she created these life-sized works partly inspired by her research into the horrors of various wars. They were inspired by both tombs. mummies. niches and gravesites and their contents as locations where families and ancestors would gather and celebrate or mourn the deaths of those family members.

In person these works are commanding and arresting. Seeing them surrounding you in a gallery is breathtaking. The title Ancestral Excavations also suggests her discovery or excavation of her family history and the legacy of her artistic father and her mother who died of cancer when Eve was a teenager. She was looking through, and at times incorporating, these photos as ink transfers. Perhaps I will show the remaining pieces someday in person to revisit how monumental they truly are.

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My grandfather, Irwin Whitaker, shifted laterally from ceramics to enamels later in his career, when arthritis in his hands made it increasingly painful to throw pots. Enamel allowed him to continue working with many of the things that had always interested him: heat, chemistry, earth, color, and the transformation of material th…

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It is well known that words and concepts reside in the brain and nerves. Emotions reside in the brain and nerves as well. Can I suggest that what I call ‘word/emotions’ exist? The brain after all is a nervous tissue, coevolved with language.

Therefore, I am suggesting that words do share tiny hugs with emotions. If I might go a little further, I am suggesting perhaps this is more granular than we think. Perhaps there are emotions hugging almost EVERY word! Most are benign, some are not! If I yell at you, I have just blasted you with word/emotion! If I tell you that you are beautiful, I have just shared positive ones. 

In certain ways we are lost to what other people think or feel. This must be remembered often. 

It is true that sentences carry real power. 

(One thing I found that helps during trauma involving words is compartmentalization. Like disruptive kids, separate the word/emotions. It is smart to begin healing them after they have quieted.)

To this point it is a responsibility of people who use language that they help heal words (word/emotions) with tiny medicines, for themselves and for others. 

It is true that individuals differ in what word might pair with what emotion, what happiness, what anxiety, what degree of each. So I suggest sensitivity. I suggest we heal each other. And though we may not know what words to use, they often are a very good start.

Oil on canvas, 48in

Lyrics, arrangement by SW, ai help by Suno

AI rating [30]

TriDisciplinary

graphite, type on paper / digital, gpt, Suno

AI rating [15]

AI - rating [25]

On this farm lives a nice, old farmer. He keeps everything the way he likes it: in harmony… the kind that farms often have all on their own. He tweaks and nudges so everything is just right. The chickens here, the goat there. Everything arranged just so. So it works.

On a day with a light breeze, a brightly dressed itinerant artist hops the farmer’s gate and sits on the gnarly stump of a giant old apple tree. He smokes his pipe.

The Artist calls to the Farmer, who is feeding the fish in a little pond: “Hey there, fella. Might I do some work? I’d like to ‘pretty up’ this farm and make it dazzle— you know, the way it was meant to be seen. Can I do that for you?”

The Farmer is skeptical, but he agrees. The Artist only wants a night’s board and one square meal for his work.

The Artist wastes no time. He hurries to the pond, where he knits little sweaters for the fish and tailors a suit for the goat. He paints the house a bright blue and gives the chickens their own little flags to wave in tribute to the author. Then he adds brilliant spirals to the wheels of the Farmer’s cart so they spin bright yellow and red. Finally, he places a scarlet hat—embroidered with a mustang—on the Farmer’s head.

The Artist sits back on the stump and lights his pipe.

The Farmer has been watching the flurry of activity with calm. When it is over, he says, “Well… my coattails won’t get caught in my spokes now that the wheels of my cart are so colorful.”

The Artist looks puzzled. “Doesn’t this show dazzle and make you want more? Doesn’t it make you think about why the fish would even need sweaters?!”

The Farmer tells him, “Nope. Frost is why sweaters are necessary.”

The Artist taps his pipe into the wind and says, “Exactly my point!”

“It sounds like you don’t ever really have your hands full,” the Farmer says.

“One would think! … if one only thought of utility like you. But Modernity calls! Idle hands and open minds!” the Artist responds. “The mother of invention—and imagination!”

“I have need of inventions,” the Farmer says.

“You have come around to see that invention, art, and imagination share the same root. Like the author of this story, they are commensurate.”

“And with that, I am on my way.” The Artist hops up from his stump and heads down the path.

The Farmer walks over to his pond, sees the fish struggling to swim in their sweaters, and says, “But not all ideas are good ones,” and chuckles to himself.

SW_2025

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