Artist: Whiting Tennis

Whiting Tennis is a nationally recognized mixed media artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Tennis’s artworks merge his interest in folk and Pop art with surrealism and postwar American painting. Through a combination of figurative forms, landscapes, and dilapidated buildings, he creates a world of his own with a narrative that evokes the beauty, humor, and loneliness of everyday life. Infused with empathy and personality, his works tell a story that is familiar to the Northwest while at the same time universally American.

The characters that populate Tennis’s artworks are not direct likenesses but are simplified, architectural forms with human and animal attributes. They are created through the use of repurposed wood or collaged prints made from wood grain. These figures roam through a landscape of time-worn structures where the forgotten and worn objects of the world take on a previously undiscovered beauty.