I first encountered the work of Malcolm Whittaker in the early 90s when exhibiting at the Twentieth Century British Art Fair and, over the next decade, acquired a small, treasured collection. The paintings have moved with me many times and have been the first on the walls on each occasion. In them I see reflected many of my own interests and inspirations and love that they sit so happily alongside ancient and modern works, above old oak coffers or mid-century sideboards.
His creative process mirrors the practice of archaeology – scraping, finding, preparing and displaying – and the results are thoughtful and poetic. His influences are many and varied, cerebral and visual – geology and geological diagrams, texts, surfaces, prehistoric tools and landscape, collecting, categorizing and cataloguing. The results often resemble artefacts uncovered from a museum archive.
I am certainly not alone in my love of Malcolm’s work – there are a number of fellow admirers with much larger collections than my humb
