50 Damn Years of Whitfield 2025

Event

I threw myself an art showcase for my 50th birthday, inviting 50 friends and family to view the works that I'm proudest of. This is an event that I had been envisioning for many years — as an artist of such wide (and consequently not deep) range, it has never been feasible for my work to be the focus of a gallery showing. What better excuse to finally get that than my own 50th birthday?

The event took place at the Mission Theater and was also a catered benefit to support Taking Ownership PDX, a local nonprofit that seeks to correct the racial wrongdoings of Portland's past, supporting black families who are on the verge of being forced out by gentrification and the legacy influence of redlining. Leveraging a package of CBD products provided by the Wyld company as well as Taking Ownership merch, we produced a silent auction that, when combined with ticket sales, resulted in donations in the neighborhood of $1500.

Featured pieces included:

• painting, Time and Relative Dimension in Space
• a gallery of eight of my best photos
• an interactive digital showcase featuring works from across my life
• a display of my novel Conclusions as well as the upcoming Reverberations
• the three Synesthesia pieces
• an unannounced standup comedy set :)

Reverberations

Writing

I've been creating short fiction and poems off and on since high school, and on the back of a many-years-long novel project, I thought it might feel more digestible to build my next book as an anthology. But it wouldn't be a Whit anthology if there weren't a few unexpected twists.

Sample: Fall ›

Sample: Savory Savior ›

Synesthesia 2022

Photography

I've done a fair amount of nature photography, and at some point I realized I had captured a few nice close-ups of bones. I decided to use my design skills to adapt them into graphical mash-ups that compliment the shapes of the figures. This array now hangs in our house. Mounted or framed prints are available, please reach out here with inquiries:

Corner Table 2022

Carpentry

The master bathroom in our new house needed a little table, so I took the opportunity to push my woodworking skills and leverage the expanded space that my new garage workshop afforded. I was going for a mid-century modern aesthetic here, and in at least an amateur manner, I think I pulled that off. I learned many lessons during the project and had to pivot a few times, but I'm pleased with the end result. (just don't look too hard at the right angles)

Phoenix 2021

Illustration

I designed a phoenix tattoo for my shoulder waaaaaay back in 2009 but didn't make the ink happen until almost a dozen years later. The phoenix represents the personal resurgence I had around that time, the record adapter alludes to the wide variety of music that I grew up with, I already had a Hebrew Chai from age 18 (no, I'm not Jewish, don't ask), and the bottom circle is an adaptation of the symbol for Burning Man, an event that has been incredibly important to me since around that same year.

Y-Iota 2021

MUSIC

I discovered a stronger appreciation for electronic music in my early 30's and eventually developed an interest in composing it. So a couple of years ago I bought Logic Pro and a keyboard MIDI controller and started dabbling. So far I've composed three tracks that I'm happy with and have a few others that I'm attempting to complete over time, with an end goal of completing an EP. The title "Y-Iota" is a whimsical reference to an old-fashioned threat that you might hear in The Three Stooges, "why, I oughtta..."

Visit my SoundCloud profile ›

Never Change Never 2021

Music

I've been playing guitar since age 17 and started writing songs (or at least song starts) shortly thereafter. I've always had a dream of finishing ten of those songs and recording an album. In 2021, on the back of my Logic Pro learnings (see "Y-Iota" above), I decided to put more time into this endeavor, finally finishing a song that I had started around 1998 and recording it in earnest. Recording and production are fun and fulfilling but also tedious and difficult, and I've only gotten as far as starting a few other tracks.

The "band" name for this is The Cannon Will. I came up with that in my early 20's, liking the classic feel of it as well as the audible resemblance to "can and will." The album name above, "Never Change Never," was scrawled on a bathroom wall around the same era — I can't speak to what it meant to the author, but I appreciated gravity and yearning quality of the phrase.

Sample: Gambling Hearts

Conclusions 2020

WRITING

To date, this is probably my biggest creative accomplishment. In college I came up with a concept for a sculpture that I loved but was afraid to actually develop (I won't to give away a major plot point by explaining why). So I decided around the mid-2000s to write a short story about it instead. That story kept getting bigger until I realized that it was going to be a novel.

As a creative "long game player," projects like these can sometimes take a really long time to actually complete, which is why this one spanned something like twelve years. COVID gave me a window to finish the damned thing, and I self-published my novel, Conclusions, at the end of 2020. It's a fairly dark story that revolves around suicide, but I really love the book and am proud to have completed it.

Purchase Conclusions: Amazon ›

Purchase Conclusions: Barnes & Noble ›

The book can also be ordered from your local bookstore.

Asp 2019

Sculpture

If this piece ever gets created in real life, it will become the new "Whit Long-Term Project (WILTEP)" record-holder. I had a dream with a version of this form back in 2002 and was inspired enough to create a few drawings and make plans to build it. But reality sunk in quickly thereafter: even if I wanted to make just one of these (I actually wanted to make ten copies and sell them), I didn't really have the tools or know-how to execute it as envisioned.

The first image in the slideshow is a very accurate rendering of the intended final form: a set of glossy black pieces that emerge from the wall and that figuratively resemble the bones of a snake. As you can see, there's a lot of precision required — the angles of the pieces, the rounding of all corners, the automotive-quality black paint. This isn't something I was going to be able to produce with wood or clay. It was going to need 3D modeling and a related 3D output method.

In 2019, considering whether it might finally be time to truly pull the trigger on the project. I worked with a 3D modeler (this isn't part of my graphic design skill set) to develop the final design specifications, then consulted with a 3D printing expert to determine a feasible build plan. After exploring lots of options, I ultimately put it back on the shelf, it was likely going to cost me in the thousands to produce just one, and I didn't feel like there was a guarantee of selling the other nine copies if I spent more $$$ producing them.

T.A.R.D.I.S. 2008

Painting

This painting comes in second after Conclusions in the "WILTEP" rankings as well as being my second most important artistic accomplishment. I originally envisioned it during my senior year in college, 1997, and you can see above that its completion arrived 11 years later. Let it never be said that I give up! Okay, let it never be said that I always give up.

I actually wrote the whole story in detail on my old blog, though the Flash-based slideshow that once accompanied it no longer works. TL/DR: I didn't have the tools to figure out the colors in the 90's, tried again but still didn't have the right tools in the early 2000's, then finally figured out a methodology for designing the colors around 2007.

The full title of the painting is actually "Time and Relative Dimension in Space." Now, any Dr. Who fans will immediately recognize both forms of that name — it's the term for the protagonist's time machine. I'm not actually clear how I came by that specific title, since to this day I have never seen an episode of the show, but my perception is that it's been called that from the start. Ultimately, the painting has nothing to do with Dr. Who, though it does depict time travel: the black and white zone toward the bottom is what our minds perceive; the pale blue line represents the current moment in time; the rest of the surrounding colors are the maelstrom of infinite dimensions.

All total, I probably put between 100-150 hours into this painting, it was a highly tedious process that I'm proud to have completed but will likely never repeat. T.A.R.D.I.S. currently hangs in our dining room and is the only asset besides our home and our vehicles that is insured. :)

Keys 2007-2011

MISC

I attended my first Burning Man in 2007, and wanted to fully embrace the spirit of the event with a community art project (which is funny because I haven't done so in seven Burns since then, maybe there's too much PTSD after this one). I created the Keys project, wherein I let anyone reach into a special bag filled with small metal keys, each of them unique, then email me a photo that in some way related to their key.

The project went... well, off the rails, but kind of perfectly in a way. You can read the full story and view all of the end results on the Keys mini-site ›

Aways 2000

Painting

My aunt Susan asked for a piece of art for a housewarming gift not long after I graduated, so this is that. I wanted to create something that was emotional and moving, but also warm and disarming. The abstract piece is meant to convey something flying or swimming "away," hence the name.

This painting is comprised of cut wood blocks (funny, I have zero recollection of how I did that — at the time I'm not aware that I had a jigsaw) wrapped in canvas with very heavy application of oil paint. The reality is that using this method was taking a significant chance since A) oil takes forever to dry in the first place, much less if it's heavily built up, and B) oil paint should never directly touch canvas, that's why painters apply a layer of acrylic gesso before painting. I did that, but only where the oil paint sits on the canvas, I wanted the natural canvas color elsewhere. Consequently, some oil bled downward with gravity and tainted the canvas. Oh well. It was mostly a success.

Strokes 1996

Multimedia

I created this multimedia piece during my last year of college. I had been a drummer since around age eight and figured it might be fun to build a design project centered around that. I wrote a poem about the feelings and sensations that are involved in the act of drumming, then asked my friend and photography class cohort Allison Bozeman to take photos of me playing my drums in the street near my house.

I set up shop in the middle of the intersection, you'll see cars with undoubtedly confused drivers going by. Later I shot my own photos of various drum pieces in my house (and processed them in a darkroom — no digital cameras!), then edited all of the media together using Macromedia Director (the dominant multimedia software of that era). I've since converted the whole thing to a single video. I can't help but feel a bit sheepish about the quality of my actual drumming in this piece, and the video and audio quality are dated to say the least, but I'm proud of the overall output and execution.