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THE VEDUTA PAINTINGS OF WHITNEY BEDFORD

Aandrea Stang

On December 31, 2021, I went to the beach with my parents’ 18-month-old poodle to watch the sunset. I love the same things everyone does about the beach—the waves crashing, the light hitting the water, watching time pass as the sun sets. I also like lonely beach walks that encourage contemplation, the feeling of being at the edge of the earth, and the joy of watching a puppy running up the shore. On that day, I was hoping that 2022 would bring relief from the need for social distancing and from the fear of too-close contact with other people. I was thinking about the previous New Year’s holiday, when my parents and sister were isolated with COVID. Thankfully, they hadn’t needed to be hospitalized, but they had serious symptoms that lingered for months. That particular evening, I was feeling grateful that my nuclear family had survived. And I was really enjoying watching the dog go nuts on the beach. As I was walking toward the path home, a woman at the beach with her family called out, asking about the puppy. I explained that she belonged to my parents. The woman declared that she and her family were also partial to poodles. I learned that they lived near my parents, who still resided in my childhood home. Like me, she relished the specialness of the community. My new acquaintances offered me some champagne, and after a slight hesitation, I said yes. We sat on the damp sand, watched the dog run, and the woman introduced herself as Whitney Bedford. I recognized her name. I knew her artwork and had seen her exhibitions. It was nice to finally meet her; in fact, she was someone I felt that I should have already known. The sun set, I finished my plastic cup of champagne, I thanked Whitney and her family, and we agreed that we would see each other around the neighborhood. It meant something—meeting new people at the end of the year, at the place where possibility starts and where we look out to the next future in a sunset.

Throughout the pandemic, I had been looking at Whitney’s “Nevertheless…” project. Beginning in 2020, she had posted nearly every day about accomplished women. The project included a drawing and a description of what made the woman featured that day worth knowing and why. As I got to know Whitney, I came to understand that this was the work of a mother introducing her young daughter to

the broadest ideas about what was possible. The posts had given me a little daily inspiration. I also enjoyed silently comparing my knowledge with hers and learning from the project. So even before I met Whitney, I felt close to her.

The county beach where we first met is one of the places where I feel most comfortable and most like myself. So I was open to a stranger and her family, and I immediately felt a small-town-in-thebig-city connection with them. As anticipated, we started to run into each other. I warned Whitney about poison oak when she was exploring near the local creek. Her daughter takes lessons at the park where I bring the dog to play and where I once attended nursery school. We exchanged contact information, both to stay in touch about the neighborhood and to exchange quick messages about news transpiring in the art world. I started to pay close attention to Whitney’s artwork—what it was about to her, and what it was about to me. The paintings, like Whitney, are smart and thoughtful, and they assume the viewer is, too. Whitney and I share a love of art history, of beautiful older paintings that are about painting, and of spaces that are both real and imagined.

Eventually, she and her family got their own poodle, and we spent more time together. I’ve also spent more time with her ideas and with her paintings.

Then, in January 2025, four years after we met, our corner of Los Angeles was one of the areas devastated by fires. I evacuated my parents. Whitney’s family was temporarily displaced. We shared the anxiety of not knowing what had survived the fire. We also shared what little information we had, along with our frustrations around trying to cope and trying to identify who could help. (Both families’ homes were among those that were saved.) The aftermath created a stronger bond. At the end of a long, early morning text exchange, less than a week after the fires, Whitney signed off by saying “Thank you. I like you and I love you! And always look forward to seeing you. This is a closeness and an understanding pinned by poodles and a love of our home. Nothing better.”

The closeness derived from an understanding of place and a love of home is how I connect with the Veduta paintings, which Whitney has been developing since 2019. The series title, Veduta, takes its

van Gogh,

name from the Italian term for paintings created primarily in the nineteenth century as souvenirs for wealthy individuals to help them remember their experiences on the Grand Tour and share them with others. Whitney has manipulated this tradition, employing images of historical European landscape paintings to anchor her series. The first exhibition of this work was titled “Reflections on the Anthropocene,” reminding viewers that the work is not only about the landscape, but about the impact that humans have had on the earth’s flora and fauna.

The Veduta paintings are comprised of overlapping images, each layer using a different art historical trope (the landscape, the window as device, color) to push viewers to consider painting more broadly. In this current grouping of works, the foundational layer is the sunset on water.

Whitney utilizes the Southern California landscape, substituting contemporary visual vocabularies like those of Vija Celmins or Richard Diebenkorn for the visual vocabularies of traditional historical paintings that cover the same territory—in this case, sunsets. She recreates familiar, traditional historical paintings, capturing the beautiful and romantic changing of the light. She replaces the realities of a Southern California sunset—smog-influenced on a far-from-pristine beach that is punctuated by storm drains—with renditions of colors and forms that pay homage to Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Klee, Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Goodwin, Frederic Edwin Church, William Bradford, Jan Stanislawski,

Vincent

Evening Landscape, 1885, Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 13 7/8 x 17 inches (35 x 43 cm). Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain.

Arkhip Kuindzhi, Red Sunset on the Dnieper, 1905-8, Oil on canvas, 53 x 74 inches (134.6 x 188 cm).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Rogers Fund, 1974.

Arkhip Kuindzhi, François-Louis Français, Milton Avery, and J.M.W. Turner. The Veduta series reminds us, as viewers, that the sunset is both specific and universal.

Next, Whitney layers images of midcentury architecture, engaging our recognition of structures as she has engaged our interest in art history. What we now distinguish as significant Southern California midcentury architecture was first hailed by the designer John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture, through the magazine’s Case Study House program (1945–1966), which commissioned 36 experimental homes, primarily in Los Angeles County. Many of these homes were first constructed on hills and between trees in our then-modest neighborhood. Much like the original Veduta paintings, these homes symbolize a commitment to culture and a desire for its public acknowledgement.

And finally, the trees. Painted in startlingly unnatural, New Wave neons, the trees in this series break my heart. In the year since the fires, the trees have become a marker for me, both as storytellers and as predicators. California live oaks can withstand a tremendous impact from a wildfire. (Introduced) eucalypti procreate via the intense heat of a wildfire. I have been watching the palm trees. They were also introduced to our area, first by Spanish missionaries in the eighteenth century and later during the Great Depression, when 25,000 Mexican fan palms were planted by 400 unemployed men hired

by the city in preparation for the 1932 Olympic Games. They are now near the end of their 100-year life spans. In the paintings, the charred skeletal trees remain upright, but they are scabbed over. These trees stand by, costumed by the extraordinary colors in which Whitney has rendered them, while we wait to see how and whether they will recover.

Whitney and her family live in a jewel box residence designed by A. Quincy Jones. She uses the windows of her classic home as a formal framing device for her depictions of sunsets and landscapes— and to serve as a reminder that we are positioned inside, looking out. In Whitney’s Veduta series, the viewer shares interiors with trees, which she has said are a stand-in for people. The trees have moved indoors and, like us, are sheltered yet vulnerable. And like us, they gaze from indoors to the sea beyond. She has moved the romance of the image to the damaged trees, which stand loud in their color, injured, yet quiet and reflective. They are positioned to perform the job, like the sunset, of seeing the next future.

1 The Eames House is close by as are three other original Case Study Houses.

Aandrea Stang is an educator and curator specializing in contemporary and socially engaged art practices. She is Director of the University Art Gallery at California State University, Dominguez Hills, where she serves on the Art and Design Department faculty.