Whitney Bedford

Beneath an acrid, chemical yellow sky, a huge surge of cobalt seawater smashes one ship into another. Friend or foe? Marine battle or tragic accident? It is impossible to tell. Working within the historical framework of an classic academic convention, the marine landscape, Bedford uses fierce, disorderly colours and a highly expressive painterly technique to capsize tradition and create hybrid images of great power and emotion.

The ghostly apparitions of two tall vessels, pass, quite literally, like ships in the night. A burning streak of orange paint along the water line of one is the only sign of life. Atop a calm, black sea their masts and rigging appear skeletal against a streaky night sky as the boats seem almost to pass through one another. The title of a well-known bossanova folk song, Encontros e Despendidas (’meetings and goodbyes’) provides an appropriately romantic subtitle for this otherworldly composition.

A large sailing ship is ablaze in sight of land. From a wild, apocalyptic sky, burning cinders fall like the residue of spent fireworks, scattering in the water. The palette is one of desperation, emergency, of struggle between the cool blue waves that consume the ship from beneath, and the flaming oranges that lick its sails above. Another, more strategic battle, meanwhile, is being played out in the same composition; the fight between pictorial representation and abstraction that dominates Whitney Bedford’s work.

Two steam ships sail in apparently opposite directions. Having passed each other, they remain coupled by a strange, luminous swell – a huge wave, a patch of fog, or a spillage perhaps. The horizon effectively eliminated, sky and ocean merge to draw the viewer into their depth. Whitney Bedford’s seascapes, not unlike those of other artists working today such as Cy Twombly and Tacita Dean, return to and reinterpret J.M.W. Turner’s nineteenth-century legacy of the sublime.

A tall ship is in distress on a heaving sea, listing dangerously and losing its cargo overboard. The rigging, a fragile, ink-drawn tangle of ropes, is collapsing under the might of waves of incandescent oil paint that pummel its glowing hull from all sides. "Sometimes," the artist has stated, "it is the paint itself that sinks the images." The shipwreck as a motif appears recurrently in Whitney Bedford’s work as a metaphor for a more contemporary squall - the turbulent political and social situation in which we live today. Two ships fill the picture field, their masts all but obscured by streaks of oil. One sits calmly on the water’s surface as the other, trailing a fog of dark paint, lurches high above it as if in the act of sinking. It is not clear if these are two different ships, one perhaps ramming the other in an act of hostility, or in fact the same single ship portrayed in successive positions as it slips beneath the waves. Whitney Bedford paints such scenes from her own imagined memories of situations, places and events.