Magic Gestures: Lites and Incantations (Orange) 1981

Since the 1970s, Whiten has maintained a daily drawing practice. Working with graphite and other natural materials, his gestural notations resemble abstract signs and symbols as well as cursive scripts, often covering the entire surface of the paper. A departure from his earlier untitled graphite drawings, Magic Gestures: Lites and Incantations is a series of nine works on paper by the artist, presented both individually and collectively.

Composed of calligraphic marks rendered from right to left, as in Hebrew script, and bottom to top, each of the nine works in this series is produced on a different coloured ground. Here, Whiten references the nine colours of the mystical diagram of the Tree of Life: blue (unbounded love), green (growth, renewal), purple (victory, power, resilience), orange (surrender, acceptance), red (strength of boundaries), yellow (beauty, the sun’s radiating light), black (wisdom), grey/silver (knowing), and white (the crown, joy).

A map of creation, the Tree of Life represents a series of divine emanations embracing the energies of all creation and flowing in its expressions from the infinite to the finite—an archetypal image that appears in other works by Whiten, including Search Reach Release, 2020, and Ground Rules, 2023. Denoting the spiritual path of ascent by humankind, the inverted tree charts the soul’s journey of return to its origins through these spheres.

For Whiten, drawing is an extension of consciousness rather than a practice tied to illustration. Privileging sensing his work over reading it, he avoids a legible script, adopting strategies that undermine an intellectual interpretation. Produced with rapid strokes in quick succession, his seemingly random mark-making resembles spontaneous writing, recalling the automatic drawing practices of André Masson (1896–1987), Joan Miró (1893–1983), Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), and other Surrealists.

As if channelling the energies of an unseen force, Whiten employs the act of drawing as a mode of transition between multiple worlds. The surface of the paper becomes a mutable boundary, a permeable barrier or veil between states of consciousness. While his three-dimensional works present evidence of his ritual activities, his works on paper trace his ritual gestures, registering his processes.

In her catalogue essay from Tim Whiten: Tools of Conveyance (2022), curator Sandra Q. Firmin writes, “Whiten’s lifelong fascination with consciousness and awareness of spiritual forces led him to the inexplicable and unknowable. What source determines the shape of an object, or the speed and rhythm of the markings on a blank sheet of paper? Out of nothing comes words, objects, inscriptions. Whiten invites us to sense a felt knowledge, unconstrained by verbalized concepts and written language.”