Collection: Orrin Whalen

Orrin Whalen is a British-American painter+sculptor currently living in Los Angeles, California. In 2014 he learned the trade of scenic painting while earning His BFA in Boston at Emerson College. Recently he has shown at The Delaware Contemporary Museum and at Pluto Projects and is in private collections across the United States, England and Iceland.

His work is built from acrylic skins. It’s a process of building up many layers of paint on a smooth service applied with varying textures to a point that builds up a thick enough ‘skin’ to peel and then used to sculpt and/or collage. Sculpturally, he accentuates folds, pleats and drapes that synthetically mimic fabric in an uncanny manner. A challenge he likes to present in his work is how to wrangle the chaos and noise within the textures found in his acrylic skins into something compositionally pleasing. This process often requires the dismantling from something that has already been created.

A common theme found in a lot of his work is the synthesization of nature; shapes of palm fronds, desert cracked sand, mimics of waveforms and mountain ranges are hidden subtly in his work. These textures and forms are all inspiration from locations of his exploration of the world having lived amongst the glaciers in Iceland to the coastlines of California.

Explore Orrin Whalen's Artwork: