The Apple Doesn't Fall Far is a retrospective exhibition of Northumberland artist Tony Whitfield B. 1957, Blyth, Northumberland. The exhibition represents the bond between father, daughter and art and is curated by his daughter Amy South and The Globe Gallery.

The exhibition follows a three-week online fundraiser carried out by Amy, entitled My Dad’s Apple. This provided Tony with alternative cancer treatment and a comfortable living environment following a delayed stage 4 Cancer diagnosis, due to restricted access to hospitals during the Coronavirus pandemic. You can read the story behind the fundraiser here.

Whitfield, a plasterer by trade, entered the world of art after an accident at work, first as a life model, then as a Fine Art student from 1995 - 2005. Life, as it so often does, caused significant disruptions to his studies but through perseverance he graduated from Northumbria University in 2005 with a BA in Fine Art.  The impulse to create art existed from Whitfield’s formative years:

“I grabbed the three primary colours and white and the best paint brushes and slopped the paint everywhere. It was the only piece of mine that made it to the wall. The teacher said I should go to art school, an idea I thought impossible.”

Free from the constraints of trade practicality, Whitfield was able to challenge the materiality and processes of plaster, adapting and reinventing Secco, Fresco and Bocco painting techniques.  

Blue Flowers is number 30 of 70 of a series of Frescoes and was created using a powdered perforated drawing, printed onto wet pigmented plaster. The marks are scribed to reveal the image. Much of Whitfield’s work is about the interplay between two or three colours:

“One of them may be neutral, like a grey, or this ochre leaf. It’s trying to jump out at you, but softly” he states.  

He remembers sitting with friends and watching the changing colours of the first traffic lights in Blyth in 1975. At night, the colours captured Whitfield’s imagination, envisioning an aura that washed the surrounding buildings. His negotiation with colour, form and space has changed a lot through the years, but the interconnection is present in the translation of something immaterial, a phenomenon that transcends the work’s physical form. The unreality of the work could be seen as an opportunity to access an inner experience, like a portal.  Upon closer viewing of Static, fine detail opens up like an expanding space, the energetic scrawls leap over the frame, the surface is not just a surface. Stains of liquid plaster, bare screws, and edges of exposed plasterboard reveal Whitfield’s process, standing in contrast to a highly finished, often mirror smooth surface. Static exemplifies this. Upon pigmented plaster, layers of carving, biro and acrylic paint are built up and sanded down between thin layers of varnish glaze. This process in all of its variations creates a space of simultaneous visual depth and flatness. Amy remembers listening to the repetitive scribble as a child and reflects,

“there is something rhythmic about his process, and something melodic about his use of colour.”

In (Lines) This is Red, This is Blue, This is Yellow, the eye’s natural inclination to focus is disrupted, the colour’s energetic field vibrates. You have to focus into It.  In The Womb (Death and Re-Birth), 2004 is a painting of the experience of being in a full body cast, as part of Anthony Gormley’s ‘Domain Field’ at BALTIC, 2003. Whitfield explains:

“All I could hear was my own breath and heartbeat, it was like being in the womb… I felt a strange relief. The shapes in the painting are the remembered light that resonated in my mind after the light was diminished by layers of scrim tape. Hours later, a knock on the head, you're set! And I was broken out into the light, it was like being re-born.”

Whitfield felt that art gave him a place to escape to. Art became for him a sort of therapy:

“Life is therapy in a way, it’s good therapy it’s bad therapy, sometimes. I think that it’s important to realise and remember that there is much more going on in this life than meets the eye.”  

He remembers during his time as a plasterer’s apprentice, there was a dispute at the building merchants, and they ended up with mismatched pink and grey plaster:

“I was left alone and I found great joy in dividing the space in half, pink on top, grey below. It was a landscape and I watched it dry. My boss was not happy, but I was.”

Whitfield’s use of colour and space throughout this retrospective exhibition embodies his deeper experience and offers an opportunity for the viewer to step beyond the parameters of everyday material reality, all while being grounded in the absolute physicality of his work.  

My Dad’s Apple has been created by Amy in collaboration with a sculptor who goes by The pseudonym of Untitled Artist. The inspiration for the title came from a small apple gifted to her by her Dad, days before his diagnosis. After thriving for 25 years, the apple tree ceased to bear fruit following the death of Whitfield’s father in law, the man who originally planted it. During the first lockdown, however, Whitfield cleared the poisonous weeds that suffocated the plant, and shortly after, he harvested a single green apple, which he gifted Amy.  This modest and deeply symbolic gift has been manifest into Amy’s work and more importantly into an energetic drive. For Amy, this

“...is a symbol of hope, regeneration and determination in these difficult and uncertain times.” She sees a coloration between her fight to save her Dad’s life and to his own efforts to save the apple tree. Her  desire, strong: ‘‘If we cannot save his life, I hope that we can at least make sure that during his final days, he is held in comfort, love and dignity.”

The Apple Doesn't Fall Far - The Globe Gallery

With thanks to Jackie Whitfield for sharing her story, to Amy for sharing her art and Tony for allowing us the privilege of working with him during the most difficult of times. - The Globe Gallery