My old friend Barnaby Whitfield is a pastel artist in New York City and member of the prestigious White Columns Curated Artist Registry. Barnaby's solo exhibition "Whore With Red Cheeks" opens this Friday, April 22, at the 31GRAND gallery in Brooklyn's Williamsburg:
An unabashed and unapologetic pastel artist with an obsessive nature toned in kitsch and pith; Whitfield creates a personal mythology within an art historical context.Growing up the child of a politician and an educator in south Florida, Whitfield found himself at the age of 6 living in the master suite of a haunted Antebellum Mansion on an abandoned horse farm. The former owner, and now ghost, Norma, had succumbed to madness for the last ten years of her life. It was said she often walked to the end of the circular drive waving with undergarments fastened to the outside of her clothes. But it was inside the house that her madness truly reined, where she had stuffed her rooms with worthless discards. Whitfield's family found the former master suite's, pink and maroon tiled, bathroom, stuffed with lipsticks even filling the toilet bowl; permanently streaking it in the waxy reds his Mother and Father kept in memoriam…
