WHITNEY BEDFORD / This is Now

Whitney Bedford (b. 1976, Baltimore, Maryland) creates paintings defined by a precise visual language that combines tightly rendered detail, lush color, and evocative gesture. Her work reinterprets historical landscape painting, drawing inspiration from artists such as Milton Avery, Pierre Bonnard, John Constable, Édouard Vuillard, and others. Bedford’s utopian images of Arcadian landscapes function as a visual lexicon through which she negotiates the burden of history. Using the materiality of paint to mark and manipulate imagery, she unlocks new emotional potential within reworked compositions. Her recent paintings approach landscape through a temporal lens, placing the verdant past in conversation with an increasingly arid present. In each work, the movement of paint embodies both the creative and destructive forces of nature.

Bedford lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998 and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2003.