About

Martin Whist paints trees, rhizomes, and clouds in a borderline-naturalistic style that quietly breaks nature's structural rules, driven by awe at an intelligence in the natural world we can sense but never fully grasp.

That began early. Whist grew up with formative experiences in nature alongside exposure to contemporary art, and the two merged. At thirteen he was sent into the forests of Northern British Columbia to work in mining. "I wasn't just observing nature," he says, "I was inside its labor." His father, a Norwegian immigrant and art collector, introduced him to abstraction and gave him a vocabulary for that early, wordless sense of knowing. Michelangelo's devotion to labor in the Sistine Chapel and Pollock's claim to be nature rather than depict it showed him two ways to close the gap between experience and representation.

Today Whist paints trees, rhizomes, and clouds in a borderline-naturalistic style that quietly breaks nature's own rules. Forms loop, knot, and reach in from beyond the edge of the canvas, as if something unseen were generating what we see. Recognition begins but can't complete itself. The paintings don't pretend to know the how and why of this world. That not-knowing, and the awe that comes with it, is what drives his work.

Whist is a Canadian-born visual artist based in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia. He began his formal training at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and completed his BFA at Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver in 1992, where he also exhibited with Catriona Jeffries Gallery. He earned his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles in 1994.

Following graduate school, he exhibited with Acme Gallery in Los Angeles from the late 1990s into the early 2000s. After several years immersed in the LA art scene, Whist stepped back from public exhibition for a more introspective period of development. During this time his interests expanded into film, where he built a distinguished career as a feature film production designer.

Throughout his film career, Whist maintained his studio practice. In 2021 he returned to exhibiting with a show at Tew Galleries in Atlanta. He has since exhibited primarily in the Atlanta area, has work in private collections internationally, and continues to work from his rural studio in Chattahoochee Hills.