As a young man, Allen Whiting nearly broke the gravitational pull of his heritage. He left Martha’s Vineyard, where he was born and where his forebears had lived for 300-odd winters, to move somewhere warm. He went to university in Florida, intending to be a baseball player. But it didn’t work out.
“There came a time when I had to admit I could no longer do it,” he says. “You get into college and you meet guys who can throw a curve ball at ninety-five miles an hour, and you can’t hit it anymore. Time’s up, you know?” Some people have the talent, and some go back to the farm. He went back to the farm. But he had another talent, although he wasn’t confident of it for a few years, until a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

“I was about twenty-three,” he says.

“I’d never been to a museum. I walked in, thinking maybe I wanted to be a painter. I walked out knowing I was going to be a painter. It was like this epiphany.”

And that was when the gravity of his heritage pulled him back to the Vineyard, never to let him escape again. Nearly forty years later, he’s just turned sixty – “a time to take stock” – and is preparing in late November to release Allen Whiting: A Painter at Sixty, a retrospective book of his work (Vineyard Stories, Edgartown, 2006, 144 pages, $44.95). It’s not a cliché to say Allen Whiting’s art is his life – it’s an understatement. His art is also the lives of his ancestors – all the way back to Thomas Mayhew, the original colonial settler and governor of the Island, and Mayhew’s descendents who planted, husbanded, and built much of his subject matter.

“I don’t paint that apple tree because my grandmother planted it, but because she planted it, it’s got to mean more to me,” says Whiting. “Or if I go to land my grandfather, the painter, owned, and I can stand where he stood and look across at Menemsha, just knowing I’m seeing pretty much what he saw. I’m one of the rare artists whose subject has been at hand their whole career, so I could in theory have never left the farm, yet kept working. I had a job, I had family land, I was given a studio, I had my subject. I had every advantage come to me at just the right time.”

Indeed he did, starting with his birth, in the old Island hospital at Oak Bluffs, on July 28, 1946. Whiting grew up in a West Tisbury house built in 1668 by the son of Myles Standish, whom he refers to, flippantly, as “one of the early warlords of the pilgrims.” His family claims thirteen relatives on the Mayflower. “My great-grandfather moved to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1840s,” the artist says. “But he married a local girl. We have Mayhews on both sides of the family, and that’s the most recognizable trail to follow back to [Governor Thomas Mayhew], and all that stuff.” With the lineage came the privileges of land, education, and money. And probably the genes of artistry. Whiting’s maternal grandfather, Percy Cowen, was a professional illustrator who came back from World War I to paint landscapes on the Vineyard.

“He was a wonderful painter. I had his work, which was very exciting to me, but it was also very intimidating,” says Whiting. “I would get this turning feeling in my stomach when I thought about being an artist – that it couldn’t be done when you have this kind of competition in front of you.” Cowen was chronically ill as a result of the war. He died after only a few years. Whiting’s own father held on to the land, but he was a farmer by choice.

“We farmed because we had a farm,” he says. “My father loved it and elected to stay here and run it. But he had gone to Andover, which is a fine, young man’s school and had gone to Yale University for a semester or something before he said, ‘The hell with it,’ and moved here. His older brother stayed at Yale and became a career professor of anthropology at Harvard.

“The privilege goes on. I have a college education. It’s not like I’m here because my dad was a successful farmer.” The farm these days is fifty acres of open land in West Tisbury plus “a few other pieces around it. And there’s land in Chilmark, where we raise a little hay. We have sixty sheep and we keep some horses, chickens, that sort of stuff. It’s a big hobby.”

When Allen Whiting’s father died twenty-five years ago, leaving the farm to his three children, they got “all romantic” about making the place profitable. It wasn’t possible. “Farms run on money, and nobody’s gettin’ rich on sheep,” he says. “About three years after my father died, we had a good Boston lawyer say, ‘Well, how much do you kids plan to lose on this hobby?’” So they worked a deal with the Department of Agriculture, selling off their right to subdivide, putting the land into agricultural conservation, meaning it must always remain farmland. Says Whiting: “Now, I have to admit that we had land that we were able to sell that wasn’t part of the farm, which made it feasible to do that, but yeah, it cost us millions. As I was signing the papers I was thinking, ‘Am I going to be caretaker of Central Park someday?’”

He riffs on the vision: “High-rises, Club Meds all around, and people saying, ‘Hey buddy, we love the sheep, but they’re a little noisy in the morning. Could you keep ’em in the barn?’” But he has no doubts about the decision to rule out forever the prospect of subdividing and selling. “What would I have done with the money? Bought another run-down farm somewhere. This is Martha’s Vineyard, and we have a beautiful farm in the middle of it. So it was never a choice, really.” Besides, the farm, which doubles as his gallery, is fortuitously placed, art marketing–wise.

“State Road between the ferry and Chilmark,” he says. “A pretty heady group” – read wealthy and discerning – “drives past here.” The legacy of his family seems to have provided almost everything he needed. In a manner of speaking, it even provided Allen Whiting with a wife.

“I find it absolutely delightful, I married a woman from Salt Lake City, whose family apparently leased the Mayflower to the pilgrims,” says the painter. Lynne Whiting, educational director of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in Edgartown, questions the word “leased,” but elaborates on the connection.
“My mother’s family on both sides were part of the group that provided the ship,” she says. “They were not on the Mayflower, but were part of the financial backing for the enterprise.” She laughs at the thought that she and her husband were made for each other a dozen or so generations before birth. “Actually, I have some Native American blood, too,” she says. “We like to joke that I’ve come back to claim what’s rightfully mine.”

Jokes aside, there is no question that family connections and family heritage have provided Whiting with most of the requisites for a fulfilled life. But there is one thing that inherited advantage can’t provide, and that is a sense of personal achievement.

“I hate to use the word because it’s embarrassing, but I think I was born with some talent,” he says, but he also gives the impression he has always been somewhat diffident about his work. It shows in his repeated references to the privilege that his life has given him. It shows when he talks about being daunted by his grandfather’s work and about how hard he finds it to talk up his work to potential buyers. It shows, too, when he talks about his studies for his bachelor of fine arts, at Windham College in Putney, Vermont, from which he graduated thirty-three years ago. “I was the only one doing landscapes in the school, and being rather provincial myself, I got a little paranoid, like they looked down on landscapes.”

Twenty-seven years passed before he saw his painting teacher again, and Whiting expressed those old lingering doubts. “He said: ‘You had a direction and voice. Why would I want to make you feel you were doing something unimportant?’” Nonetheless, it remains true that the very sense of place and heritage that infuses his landscapes – the comparative advantage of his art – tended to typecast him and limit the range of what he offered. He sells landscapes of Martha’s Vineyard. That’s what buyers want and get. Very good, very authentic landscapes.

He won’t paint from photographs. He likens that to “being a chef and not wanting to drive to the marketplace to get fresh vegetables. If you’re a landscape painter, the landscape has to drive you. It’s full of good stuff. Just when you’re not sure what to do, the sun will break out and leave you a lovely streak.” He’s experiential, not intellectual, about it. He believes too much art has “too much agenda in it. I like to give up control in the hopes that something good might happen,” he says.

And he throws very little away.

“I’m kind of a right-to-lifer, you know. If I bring a painting back from outside, unless it’s obvious that it’s a failure, it’s embarrassing, I don’t get rid of it. It’s like the recording of a live performance by a musician – you don’t want to come back to the studio and fool with it too much. I try to say that painting was my direct reaction to that visual stimulation. So I also should be the student: what should that painting be teaching me?”

Because he is a plein-air painter, he tends to paint fast and small. “My little paintings are usually one session or maybe two. If I go outside for two-and-a-half hours, I usually have a little one. I’m not a finicky technician. I paint until I’m satisfied and then I stop. If you’ve got a canvas that’s forty by sixty and there’s a wind blowing, it’s a struggle. And you’ve only got, really, a two-hour span at most before the sun has moved so much that the shadows are changing and you’re chasing it. So if I find I need more time, I’ll go back at the same time in the same kind of weather.”

He cites the example of a picture he did of South Beach, which he wanted to capture after the sun went down, but before it got dark. “That gives you about forty minutes if you really hustle, so I’d take this thing down [to the water], four by six feet, get all set up, paint like hell until it got too dark, bring it home.

Two weeks of that and I had a picture. But I find it’s more abstract than if I’d taken a photograph and reproduced it.

“I was told early to make those big ones too. So sometimes I take a little study – if it’s really good – back to the studio and stand in front of it for a month and blow it up.” It’s not just that the bigger paintings are worth bigger money, he says; it’s also the fact that “if you only do little things, you’ll only be known as a little painter.” And Allen Whiting does not want to be considered a little painter, nor a Johnny One-Note when it comes to style and subject matter.

The first thing you see when you enter his barn-studio-art repository (for he keeps far more than he sells, and laments that he has to sell so much), is a very fine sketch of a female nude. There is also sculpture there. And landscapes of places other than the Vineyard. “I paint when I travel,” he says. “I’ve painted a lot in Utah. I painted in Maine, New Zealand, and for the last five years my wife has worked in the Caribbean for a couple of months in the winter, so I go down there and paint for two weeks. I’ve got hundreds of little studies I keep. I’ve only ever sold one. They’re my little post cards that I keep.”

But that may be about to change, which brings us back to the forthcoming Allen Whiting: A Painter at Sixty. It is not just a collection of land- and seascapes from Martha’s Vineyard. Included among the 115 prints will be some of those “post cards” from Utah, Maine, New Zealand, and the West Indies, as well as some charcoals of his family and other people. The reason he has decided to bring these works collectively before the public now has something – he’s not quite sure what – to do with his age.

“It’s a funny thing. I have this subtle feeling of liberation, but also of wanting to take stock. I’m sixty. I’ve got twenty years left, maybe. What do I intend to do with that? Where do I want to go? Where do I want to grow? I guess it’s partly ego, but partly also I really wanted to see the stuff in that book form. To make an assessment, to figure it out.”

He even toyed, briefly, with the idea of leaving the Vineyard paintings out of the book altogether. “I have all this other stuff, sculpture and drawings. I had a nice little exercise: I put all the landscapes away and then thought there might be another time for it. This is like my first [musical] album. You don’t have to put on all the outtakes and all your thoughts. Put out something good and recognizable and get people’s attention.” People off-Island, in particular. He’s shown in the big cities but never had any long-term relationship with any gallery owners.

“So this book is a calling card. It says it all. I don’t have to have somebody looking at slides held up to the window. There’s a lot of people doing just that. If you have an introduction, they’ll give you maybe a second look, but if you just send ’em slides, they don’t even want to look at them.”

The idea of the book took its first step toward fruition when, through a mutual friend, he met a pair of publishers on the Vineyard. “It was kind of an Island thing,” says Whiting. “I figured, ‘If they’re here and I can go knock on their door, I might just get it done.’” John Walter and Jan Pogue both had long publishing experience; he as the former executive editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she as a writer of corporate histories. They were new to publishing – they had done one book since their move north – looking for Vineyard stories (which happens to be the name of their publishing company). For this project, it was a matter of digging up the requisite cash – a coffee-table book of paintings is a big, costly production – and selecting the art.
Finding the money proved to be the easy bit, and finding the art the hard bit.

“I didn’t feel I could come up with $70,000,” says Whiting. So “I found half a dozen of my best patrons, and I said I want to do this book and I need some money up front, and when it’s all said and done I’ll either pay you your money back over time, or I’ll give you a painting that’s worth the contribution. No one balked.”

But as for the paintings:

“My records are in shambles, like most artists’. I had this pile of slides of pretty much everything I’ve done, but I didn’t identify them. I’d look at the slide and say, ‘Gee, that’s a beauty. Where do you suppose that is?’ Many had no names. Many more had titles like West Tisbury Field or Chilmark Sunset.”
Eventually, he chose 150 works, dating from 1974 to the present, of which more than half had never been sold. “I figured that wouldn’t hurt me,” he smiles. “If the book does well and I own the paintings. . . .” Besides, organizing things with the owners of the rest of the paintings, some as far away as California, was a logistical challenge – find the owner, talk to the caretaker, go get the painting, take it to the photographer, take it back. “I had a whole winter of doing that.”

Once all the slides were taken, the selection was winnowed down to 115. “It’s a historical perspective that’s heavily weighted to the last fifteen years. I won’t say I’ve got work from every year, but about ten from each of the first couple of decades and then more of the more current stuff. And I’ve got a dozen drawings.” As for the text: “There were a lot of tries. I was up half the night writing, ‘When I was a little boy . . .’ Oh, God. ‘When I was a little boy . . .’ Oh, God. Over and over again. It finally came to me when all the pictures were assembled [that] I could go through and key off them.”

Late in this passing tourist season, Allen Whiting is a bit twitchy. He’s tired of not having enough outside time to paint, tired of the summer social round, tired of the need to tend to the gallery, and uneasy about the final phase of book production – the printing, which is being done in Korea. Whiting, used to Vineyard ways and dealing with people he knows, was conflicted over whether he should go over there to monitor quality. In the end, he decided not to.
“Sometimes, you’ve got to roll the dice a bit,” he says. He trusts the Koreans to do it right. Allen Whiting: A Painter at Sixty goes on sale by  Thanksgiving. And whatever lingering worries he has about the printers, the artist’s greatest concern will, at that point, be behind him.

“There’s always that fear that you’ll look at it all and say, ‘Man, you aren’t what you thought you were.’ I’m just very happy to say that during the process of selection, I wasn’t scrounging around for my old revolver because I didn’t like the artwork.”