Whiting Tennis’s (b. 1959, Hampton, VA; lives and works in Seattle, Washington) work encompasses drawing, sculpture and painting. Tennis often employs the “automatic” drawing method that was popularized by the French Surrealists. A practice as old as artmaking itself, the crayon is allowed to roam the paper freely, like the cursor of an Ouija board, summoning shapes and ideas from which to motivate paintings and sculpture. Automatic drawing acts as a window into the world of dreams, totems, the anthropomorphic and the zoomorphic, as well as the home of the personal and the collective myth. Mining the lexicon of enigmatic, self generated imagery, Tennis enlists his materials with their physical parameters, to help him determine final compositions. As a result he has constructed an iconography that is warmly familiar and nostalgic but uniquely autonomous.
He holds a BFA from the University of Washington, Seattle.
Tennis has been exhibiting at the Gallery since 2001 and shows regularly in the Northwest at the Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle and the Russo Lee Gallery, Portland. He’s also had solo museum exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum, the Hallie Ford Museum, and the Museum of Northwest Art. Tennis has been included in group exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art, Seattle and Tacoma Art Museums, the Bolinas Museum and others. Tennis’s works are in public collections at the Portland Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; and The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs.