Elizabeth Whiteley facts for kids

Elizabeth Whiteley (born 1945) is an American artist and designer. She is known for creating art that combines her love for both math and art. She uses shapes, patterns, and numbers to make her unique paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

Early Life and Learning

Elizabeth Whiteley was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1945. She went to college at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and earned a bachelor's degree. Later, she studied library science at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and got a master's degree. She also earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she focused on art.

Her Artistic Journey

Elizabeth Whiteley loves to explore how math and art are connected. She often uses basic shapes like rectangles, triangles, and squares in her artwork. These shapes are the building blocks for many of her creations. Art critic David Carrier once said that seeing the grid she used helped him understand how her art was made. He noted that this way of working actually gave her more freedom to create her patterns.

Paintings, Drawings, and Sculptures

Since 1988, Elizabeth Whiteley has used a special design method called dynamic symmetry. This method, taught by Jay Hambidge, helps artists create balanced and pleasing designs using geometric rules. She uses it for her paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

She also uses a geometric idea called the "sacred cut." This idea was named by a Danish engineer, Tons Brunes. Whiteley is also inspired by the research of Kim Williams and Jay Kappraff on this topic. She uses the sacred cut in her ink and metalpoint drawings, both as the main subject and to help structure her artwork.

Elizabeth Whiteley has even found inspiration in Euclid's Elements, an ancient book about geometry. She uses ideas from this book to create her sculptures and drawings. She also studied the work of British designers like Lewis Foreman Day. She learned how to use their techniques to make modern patterns.

Artist's Books

Elizabeth Whiteley also creates unique items called artist's books. These are works of art that use the form of a book. She learned about them while studying photography with Keith A. Smith at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1989, she designed and helped illustrate a special "shuffle book" called Deck of Cards. This book was made with offset lithography, a printing process. A famous expert on artist's books, Johanna Drucker, even wrote about Whiteley's book in her textbook.

In 2018, Whiteley created Welcoming Beauty 1. This book has hand-painted folders with papers folded in complex ways. These folds are based on dynamic symmetry, but in a three-dimensional way. As you unfold the papers, you discover Whiteley's writings about beauty. She later made a digital version called Welcoming Beauty 2 in 2019. This e-book includes her paintings, writings, and drawings based on the sacred cut.

Metalpoint Drawings

Whiteley uses a special drawing technique called silverpoint. This method was very popular during the Italian Renaissance, hundreds of years ago. It involves drawing with a silver stylus (a pointed tool) on a specially prepared surface.

She became very interested in drawing with metal when she was an art student. Her anatomy teacher, Paula Gerard, was a master of this technique. Whiteley uses silver or gold styluses to draw plants, geometric shapes, and the sacred cut.

Nancy Sausser, a curator, wrote about Whiteley's metalpoint art. She said that Whiteley shows respect for the past in her work, but also stays connected to the present. Her metalpoint drawings are even discussed in a textbook by Susan Schwalb and Tom Mazzullo.

Professional Work

Elizabeth Whiteley helped start and edit EyeWash, a monthly newspaper about visual arts in the Washington D.C. area. It was published from 1989 to 1993. She wrote articles and reviews for the paper. Records from EyeWash can be found at the Archives of American Art.

Whiteley has also written articles for art and math journals. She has given talks at conferences like the international Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM). She shares her ideas on how geometry can inspire modern patterns.

From 2006 to 2011, she was on the editorial board of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts (JMA). She also reviewed articles for them. She was also an editor for Hyperseeing, a journal for the International Society of Art, Mathematics, and Architecture (ISAMA).

Art Shows

Elizabeth Whiteley's art has been shown in many art exhibits, both in her region and around the world. In 1979, the Carnegie Museum of Art bought one of her artworks. In 1985, she had her own show of paintings and monoprints at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Her mathematical art has also been featured in shows at the international conferences of The Bridges Organization. For example, her sculptures based on the math of the square root of two were shown in 2006. In 2012, her bas-relief sculptures were also exhibited.

Where Her Art Lives

Elizabeth Whiteley's drawings and metalpoint works are part of museum collections. You can find them at places like the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Erie Art Museum, and the Spencer Museum of Art.

Her artist's books are kept in special collections in many museum libraries. These include the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Her printed artist's books are in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).

Art schools like the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) also have her artist's books for students to study.

Selected Writings

• Whiteley, E. "Visually Transforming Square Root Rectangles," Symmetry: Culture and Science. vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 535–538 (1995).
• Whiteley, E. "Visual Transformation of Square Root Rectangles," Symmetry: Culture and Science. vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 639–640 (1995).
• Whiteley, E. "Hyperseeing on a Two-Dimensional Plane," Hyperseeing, the Journal of the International Society of Art, Mathematics, and Architecture, September 2007.
• Whiteley, E. "A Process for Generating 2D Paintings and Drawings from Geometric Diagrams," Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, Vol. 2, No. 1, March 2008.
• Whiteley, E. "Curved Plane Sculpture: Triangles," Hyperseeing Special Issue on ISAMA (International Society of Art, Mathematics, and Architecture) 2010. Proceedings. Ergun Akleman and Nathaniel Friedman, editors.
• Whiteley, E. Welcoming Beauty 2, Spring Light Books, 2019. Apple Books app, Cupertino CA.
• Whiteley, E. A Loose Leaf Sketchbook. Sketchbook Project, Volume 15. Brooklyn Art Library. Brooklyn, New York, 2019.
• Whiteley, E. "Contemporary Art Inspired by Geometry," Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, v. 14:1-2, pp. 164–166. March–June 2020.