Jeffrey Whittle: Myth, Memory, and the Interior Landscape
Jeffrey Whittle’s paintings unfold like quiet revelations—symbolic narratives suspended between psychological introspection and the mythic spaces of the Southern imagination. Over the past two decades, Whittle has developed a rich visual vocabulary rooted in figuration and metaphor, marked by recurring motifs: twin animals, night skies, flowering plants, and floating vessels. His art, though often dreamlike, is grounded in discipline and tradition—channeling Renaissance structure, Indian miniature symbolism, and Southern storytelling into a body of work that is both intimate and expansive. Whittle’s long relationship with Matney Gallery has played a key role in his mid-career development. His first participation was in Art House on City Square (2013), a landmark exhibition that temporarily converted Williamsburg’s historic city council chambers into a contemporary gallery. Organized by the Linda Matney Gallery in collaboration with the City of Williamsburg, the project spotlighted leading Southern voices including Whittle, Kent Knowles, and Art Rosenbaum. Whittle’s contribution signaled his alignment with a new generation of Southern artists whose work blurs the lines between personal mythology and regional identity.
Harvest Castaway , 40 x 50 inches, oil on canvas, 2013 (left) and Paperboats I, mixed media on panel, 31 x 25 inches, 2012 (right), Art House on City Square, 2013
A pivotal moment came in 2016 with Both Sides Now, a two-person exhibition at Matney Gallery pairing Whittle’s luminous paintings with Crisha Yantis’s sculptural forms. The title, borrowed from the Joni Mitchell song, speaks to the dualities that underlie Whittle’s work: conscious and subconscious, interior and exterior, fleeting and eternal. In paintings such as Ripple Effects and Celestial Bouquet, floating blossoms drift across deep astral fields, and animals—elephants, birds, turtles—glide through space in mirrored formation. These twins are not decorative echoes, but narrative tools: metaphors for self-dialogue, doubling, memory, and emotional reflection.
Cosmic Bouquet, mixed media on canvas, 43 x 37 Inches, 2016 (let) and Descension of an anonymous saint, mixed media on panel, 24 x 29 inches, 2012 (right), Both Sides Now, 2016
Infinity Encountered, Mixed media on canvas, 43 x 37" inches, 2017 (Detail)
Exhibition view of Both Sides Now, 2016
Whittle has described his paintings as attempts to depict the "interiors of the self," often using mirrored figures as stand-ins for aspects of identity in conversation. This interior focus is matched by an equally compelling visual elegance. His color palettes are rich—blues of oceanic depth, pinks that suggest blooming and decay, and radiant golds and whites that act as beacons or thresholds. Within many works, cartographic patterns emerge—faint maps embedded into the bodies of animals or the contours of waves—suggesting journeys both physical and emotional. These are not literal places, but psychic geographies. His maps don’t guide so much as they reflect: markers of memory, longing, and the push-pull between place and self.
Jeffrey Whittle in his studio (left) and Wisteria (Fireflies), mixed media on canvas, 48×60, 2024, The Landscape and Current Midtown, 2024
Whittle’s career spans both studio practice and academic engagement. A Georgia native, he holds a B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia and an M.F.A. from Cornell University. He also studied at Cooper Union and participated in immersive programs in Florence, Italy—experiences that continue to shape his compositional sensibility and his ongoing involvement in the Cortona Study Abroad program. Since 2006, Whittle has taught painting and drawing at the University of Georgia, where he emphasizes experimentation, technical rigor, and intuitive thinking. Earlier, he served as Gallery Director for the Lamar Dodd School of Art at UGA (2008–2013) and later as Interim Gallery Director at Agnes Scott College, where he curated exhibitions that deepened regional dialogue and brought national voices into conversation with Southern artists. Whittle’s paintings have been exhibited in solo and group shows across the U.S. and internationally. Highlights include The Artist as Cartographer at Torrance Art Museum (CA), Gathered: Georgia Artists at MOCA GA, Constructing Fablesat the University of the South, and Looking Up <> Looking Out at the Macon Arts Alliance. He has twice participated in Il Mostra in Cortona, Italy, reflecting a sustained international presence. His work has been collected by patrons in Georgia, Virginia, California, and New York, and his 2012 painting Paper Boats I was featured in the Oxford AmericanSummer 2015 issue, an extension of the magazine’s earlier recognition of him as one of the “100 Under 100” Southern artists to watch.
Devil Carousel, mixed media on panel, 30 x 14 inches, 2011, Three Excellences of Culture, 2022
Whittle’s return to Williamsburg through Matney Gallery exhibitions such as The Landscape, The Portrait: Histories, Myths, and Allegories, and Installation/Works on Paper reaffirmed his place within a circle of artists reimagining the landscape and portrait genres through Southern perspectives. His inclusion in these thematically curated exhibitions underscores the versatility of his work—how it shifts between allegory and observation, figuration and abstraction, and always carries with it a poetic sensibility.
Though Whittle’s art is firmly grounded in the Southern visual tradition, it resists provincialism. His images, while filled with magnolia blossoms, turtles, and birds, are not about the South so much as from it—carriers of place but not confined by it. His paintings echo the spirit of Southern Gothic literature or magical realism, where the ordinary is made strange, and the familiar yields to the mysterious. There is always a sense of reverence in his images—toward beauty, toward nature, and toward the quiet power of emotional truth. For those who collect contemporary painting with a mind toward psychological depth and narrative construction, Whittle’s work offers both formal sophistication and symbolic richness. His surfaces are painterly and luminous, yet never precious. His forms are constructed with clarity, but never rigidity. Each painting suggests a story, yet withholds easy answers—inviting instead a kind of active contemplation.
Jeffrey Whittle’s impact on the gallery, and more broadly on the narrative tradition in Southern painting, continues to unfold. His work holds space for both myth and reflection, asking viewers to slow down, to look inward, and to imagine alternative paths through the terrain of memory. In a world that often rewards immediacy, Whittle’s paintings offer the opposite: a quiet, radiant patience.