Elise Whittemore is a painter/printmaker who makes a living as an editorial designer of books and magazines. She has a BFA from Syracuse University where she studied printmaking, photography and design. Her studies have included woodblock printmaking and lithography at the Art Student's League in New York and a painting residency at the School of Visual Arts. She's been a member of the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists' Coalition as well as 215 College Gallery in Burlington, VT. She's curated multiple shows in different venues around Vermont. In 2017, she was given the mid-career Barbara Smail award from the Burlington City Arts organization.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Memory looms large in my work and makes me examine how I reconstruct places of importance. How scale shifts depending on what is currently claiming my attention, how places and times can conflate and continually show up. My subject matter is nature, but it is also the way I choose to make the work. The physical nature of creating printing plates makes awkward the process of drawing and forces my hand away from familiar assumptions. The labor of art making challenges me to pursue the different ways the hand and material can create meaning together. How does the process of looking at the same image slowly emerging and repeating change that work? And how does our reading of that work change as we see more and more of it? I am interested in making multiples, using their accumulation to see how they change the space they occupy, and how that change affects their meaning.

NEWS

"REVIEW: PAPER at 215 College Gallery"
Art Map Burlington, January 2011

"REVIEW: Considering Nature at 215 College Gallery in Burlington", 
Vermont Art Zine, May 2010 vermontartzine.blogspot.com/2010/04/

"Small Works, Big Ideas" YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0yajpiU3BM, June 2009

"Three in One," Seven Days, June 2009 sevendaysvt.com/vermont/three-in-one

"Cooperative Art." Burlington Free Press. August 2008.

"215 College Street Artists' Cooperative Gallery." Artscope Magazine. July/August 2008.

"From Mellifluous to Sublime." Burlington Free Press. June, 2007.