The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 36

Rhonda Whitehead?british Trastevere 2011/12 Signed Unframed Oil, mixed media on canvas 68 x 70 cm Guide Price £1,100 “ Rhonda trained at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting before going on to an MA at the Royal College of Art, which she completed in 1971. Since then she has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows, and won numerous awards. In 2006 she was awarded first prize in the Byard Open Exhibition in Cambridge. She has also been a visiting lecturer at various colleges of art, including Canterbury, Byam Shaw, Homerton College Cambridge and St. Martin’s School of Art. The critics Marina Vaizey, Guy Brett, Margaret Garlake, Helen Smithson, Linda Talbot, William Packer, Max Wykes-Joyce, Waldermar Januszczak, Monica Petzal and Sarah Kent to name a few have all written enthusiastically about her work. Recent work is inspired by the coloured stuccoed crumbling walls in the built environment especially in the Italian cities of Rome and Venice. These paintings are a wide range of colour, texture and elements of geometric forms. As one critic says “Whitehead captures and records the surface loss, imperfections and characteristics of erosion and time on manmade surfaces. Whitehead’s painterly response awakens our interest in all manner of physical and climatic exchanges we read on the surfaces of buildings. It is as if the artist were capturing the mind that exists in all matter. The results of this exploration are large textural works, which are at once beautiful and evocative of the history experienced and documented by our architectural surroundings.” rhonda whitehead 34 The Art of Resistance? Defending Academic Freedom ” Lot 9