Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our seventh exhibition by Seattle artist Whiting Tennis. The title, Provincetown Drawings, refers to a September 2021 artist residency at Provincetown Tennis Club, home of the DNA Residency Studios, in Provincetown, MA.
It’s really just one big room where four artists quietly work to the sound of tennis balls being hit back and forth on the clay courts below. If you’ve never been to P-Town, I doubt there’s a better time to go than September, when the warm, late summer breezes and cool beach-town evenings put you into a kind of waking dream-state. I’m sure that it helped me draw… draw more, longer and freer. I grew to love making art to the sound of the tennis balls. –Whiting Tennis
The artist took to the residency a cache of vintage oil pastels given to him by a family friend whose artist parents had recently retired from their studios.
These beautiful pastels have been, for someone who generally mixes paints down to brown and grey, a daring invitation to color. I love them and I’m learning from them, and yet I seem to have entered into a sort of challenge or experiment. I think in my head I’ve set out to use them up. I’d like to thank Nick Lawrence for my excellent time on the cape, and the Buchanan family for the lifetime supply of pastels. –Whiting Tennis
Biography Whiting Tennis has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, WA; Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR; and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY. The artist had several works in the 2014 California-Pacific Triennial at Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA. He was the 2008 recipient of the Arlene Schnitzer prize given as part of Portland Art Museum’s Contemporary Northwest Art Awards Exhibition. The artist was also the winner of the 2007 Neddy Artist Fellowship for Painting awarded by Seattle’s Behnke Foundation. Major works by Whiting Tennis are in the collections of Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS, and the Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY. The artist received his BFA from the University of Washington. He currently lives and works in Seattle.
