Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Hey, a quick reminder. Long Island Compromise is this month's Get Lit With All Of It Book Club pick and we'll gather on Wednesday, December 4th to talk about it at the New York Public Library. I'll be joined by author, Taffy Brodesser-Akner and you. Tickets are free, but they are already almost sold out, so don't delay in reserving yours. Now. Head to wnyc.org/getlit for more information. Again, the event is at 6:00 PM on December 4th. Reserve tickets and learn how New Yorkers can borrow the eBook for free at wnyc.org/getlit. That is in the future. Now let's get this hour started with art.

To commemorate its 200th anniversary, the Brooklyn Museum has turned its attention to local talent. A new exhibition displayed displays work from more than 200 Brooklyn artists, following an open call that received almost 4,000 submissions. This hour, we're speaking to some of the artists selected for the show, starting with Tabitha Whitley.

Whitley was born and raised in Brooklyn and trained at FIT and the New York Academy of Art. She makes portraits using oils and acrylics with bright popping colors. And if you talk to Tabitha, you know she's an expert on skin tone, which you can learn more about by taking one of her classes. She's also a teacher. Her piece on view at the Brooklyn Museum exhibition is titled Botanic Luncheon. It's on view through January 26, and Tabitha Whitley is in studio with me right now. Welcome to WNYC and congratulations.

Tabitha Whitley: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: So anyone who wants to look at this piece, you should go to our Instagram, our stories @AllOfItWNYC. I'll describe it for people. A figure of two figures sitting on a blanket in a park. What's the origin of this story?

Tabitha Whitley: This piece is similar to my work in general. I've always been interested in figures, in landscapes and a lot of my older work, whenever I'm getting reference for my paintings, I go out and I find a model and I do a photo shoot. In my past work, I've always just hidden the city and focused on the foliage, but with this new body of work, I wanted to show a bit more of the city.

This particular piece, the photo for it was taken in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and I wanted to speak a little bit about kind of referencing the impressionists of the 19th century that just embraced that beautiful dappled sunlight and have these beautiful scenes of figures in the park. This whole body of work that this piece comes from is really inspired by light and the light of spring. I was considering all of those things when I began this piece.

Alison Stewart: Yes, the colors are beautiful. There's blues and reds, bright yellows, and your paintings have this vibrancy, the sense of color about them. How did you develop this sense, this sensibility, this painting sensibility?

Tabitha Whitley: I think it actually started from feeling like I didn't understand color very well.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Tabitha Whitley: I felt like there was just so much to learn. Even after grad school, I felt like I learned so much, but color's so complex. I felt like I had so much more to learn that I focused more in color after I graduated. Also, I just think I'm a colorful person. I'm drawn to color. It speaks to me. If something's colorful, I get pulled in, and so I just ended up leaning into that.

Alison Stewart: How does the color work in Botanic Luncheon?

Tabitha Whitley: Well, it actually, it's kind of like a contemporary approach to a classical technique. Traditional artists have used underpaintings to build up their work. It's like an indirect painting style. So I start with-- and underpainting is almost like creating a black and white photograph, or almost like you're creating your own coloring book, but it's got light and shadow. Traditionally, artists would use brown and white or black and white, something more natural, and then build their lights up from there.

I'm still resolving all of my lighting issues monochromatically, but instead of using a natural color, like brown is my darks, and white is my lights, I'm using red is my dark, and white is my lights, and green underneath the people's skin. As I'm building upon that, I leave a lot of the original underpainting, which is so chromatic and bright. It's like I'm creating new rules for each painting. I just come in with a general plan, but there's still a lot of room for exploration.

It's almost like, yes, imagine making a colorful coloring book for yourself. It's like, "Okay, now go on top of this, but everything's red, now what do you do?" That's how the process starts.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking about her piece, which is part of the new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Artists exhibition displays over 200 local artists who live in the borough. My guest is Tabitha Whitley. Do you remember your first artistic memory or your first visit to a museum?

Tabitha Whitley: Oh, wow, no. I mean, because I grew up in New York. So they would take us to The Natural History Museum and all of these museums just all the time. That was just where you went as a kid, and I was always the kid who liked to draw. I think all children are creative in that way. I think it's lucky that every child gets a crayon put in their hand. I just happened to have a love for it. My family saw that, and fostered, and encouraged me.

I always say things like if only every child had an instrument put in their hands, or every child had the opportunity to explore an interest in that same way, more young people-- more people would discover the thing that they're passionate about. I was just lucky in that I was the kid who always drew. I never stopped. My family supported me. I took weekend classes at Pratt when I was in junior high and LIU while I was in high school. I went to Brooklyn High School of the Arts.

It didn't feel like a straight path while I was on it, but then you just look back on your life and realize you've been going in one direction, but it's not a new thing. My grandfather went to art and design. My mother went to LaGuardia for singing, so there was already a precedence of performing arts in the family.

Alison Stewart: Who were artists that you used to look up to when you were young?

Tabitha Whitley: I was that weird kid who didn't really have a hero. I actually thought I was strange because kids always had their heroes and their people they admired, and I kind of was like, "Oh, I guess I should find someone to idolize," but I never really did. I just--

Alison Stewart: That's kind of cool, actually. It is kind of cool. I mean, you had your own vision.

Tabitha Whitley: I guess. I went through phases like I think most Millennials went through, especially if you're interested in art, probably had like an anime nerd phase. I definitely went through one of those. Sailor Moon was like my gateway anime, and then I think when I first really started to appreciate classical art was when I went on a trip with my mom to London. She loves to plan parties, and she wanted to plan a sweet 16 for me, but I didn't really want the party. It was the early 2000s. I didn't think it was appropriate to have a party where my friends could be twerking on each other in front of my grandma. It just wasn't for me.

She was like, "Well, we could take a trip," and I'm like, "I didn't know that was an option. Let's do that." So we went to London and being in that art high school, that was the first time I had been doing art regimentally every day, and that sucked a little of the passion out of it for me. I hadn't experienced being told what to make. Before, I used to make art every day for myself. Then once I got to high school, I was just making art in class.

Then when I went with my mom to London, and we went to the art museums there, like, I remember being at the Victoria and Albert and they had, not the original David, but a cast of the David. I was just blown away by that, blown away by the art I saw and it reignited a fire in me, where I just felt the passion come back. That was the thing that drove me forward once I started applying to college.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Tabitha Whitley. She's part of the Brooklyn Artists Exhibition. She's got a piece up. It's running through January 26th. When you look on your website, and I know it's only a portion of what you do, but you do see a lot of people, a lot of faces. What inspires you about someone to think, "I want to paint that person?"

Tabitha Whitley: You know, there are people I've known for years and never wanted to paint. Then just one day, the light hits their face in a certain way, and I'm just like, "Oh, that's it." I choose my models when I look at someone's face and then I start to see compositions forming around them. Their face gives me ideas and makes me want to paint. Sometimes it could take months, sometimes it could take years, other times, it's like, "I see you, I want to paint you."

Alison Stewart: It's really interesting, because you have a huge presence on TikTok. You give advice, you show your work. Some videos are very funny. For anybody who wonders, it's tabithawhitley_art for anybody who wants to check them out. When you think about TikTok and you think about what you do as an artist, how has TikTok been helpful?

Tabitha Whitley: It's so strange. I got on it in 2020. I was furloughed from my job. I had lots of free time. At first it was just an app that kids danced on and then I started to see artists on it. I felt like I got onto the Instagram art scene kind of late and so I was like, "I want to just hit this wave early and just go for it."

There's so much playfulness and humor with TikTok anyway. I like to think of myself as a funny person. I make my friends laugh, I have a sense of humor and I have taken myself seriously as an artist for so long and do take myself very seriously, but I think TikTok was an opportunity for me to open up a little bit more to my audience, share my creative process, but then also share my sense of humor and not take myself too seriously by allowing a little humor in with my process and just sharing that vulnerability or that aspect of my personality. I think you'd be missing a part of me to not see that I think.

Alison Stewart: Which videos tend to get the most views?

Tabitha Whitley: Honestly, the process videos. I have a few funny videos. They're few and far in between. I think the videos that seem to me to speak to people and connect with people the most is when I share my painting or drawing or just my artist-- my technical techniques. Yes. I think people seem to respond the most and then I get questions and then I try, if I can, to do follow-up videos to answer those questions. It's the teacher in me. If you get me started, I'll just go on and on and on.

Alison Stewart: One of the TikToks you have is that you-- this trick you talked about earlier, about the people's skin tone being green as your first layer of paint. Why does this work?

Tabitha Whitley: This is getting into color theory now, so I'll try to be brief. It speaks to the concept of colors having temperature. If you think about oranges, reds and yellows as being warm colors, then blues and greens and purples, those are your cool colors. I like to have the opposite temperature of whatever I'm going to paint underneath the thing I'm painting. Now, there is a history of artists using natural green as an underpainting color, but I use a very chromatic, bright phthalo green because again, my draw-to color. That green, it serves a few purposes. One, it's a cool color. The warm skin tones really vibrate and contrast on top of that. Also, most of us have green undertones in our skin, especially when you can see the veins through your hands and things like that.

The green serves as a means to add more vibrance to the color I'm painting on top, but it also adds that feel of transparency that skin has, because you can feel at moments where the green peeks through, like you're seeing through the skin, which is actually one of the things that makes painting people in general so complex, because skin is transparent, it's opaque, it reflects light, it absorbs light. It does all of those things at once on the same subject in the same lighting scenario. It takes many different approaches to texture and technique in order to paint a person, which is why artists have studied people for hundreds of years, because if you could paint a person, you could paint anything. People often think glass and water, that's the hardest thing to paint. But it's skin.

Alison Stewart: I know you teach. Where do you teach now?

Tabitha Whitley: I teach at the New York Academy of Art.

Alison Stewart: What do people want to know when they come to the New York Academy of Art, what do they want to know as painters?

Tabitha Whitley: It's a very unique school in that it's the only graduate school in the country with a focus in the classical figurative painting, drawing, and sculpture techniques. It's a place where people specifically come to improve their skills, which is something I wanted when I was in undergrad and why I still keep hanging out and have volunteered and teach there now, because I just feel like this community just attracts people who I want to talk to and who can geek out about the technical aspects of art-making and who also have the humility to say, "I have more to learn."

Alison Stewart: Right. They already have a skill set. They just want to take it to the next level.

Tabitha Whitley: Yes, and so when my students come, they're specifically coming to learn about painting skin and color theory, because the class I teach is literally called Painting People of Color. It is at its core a color theory class. I'm really talking about the color wheel, I'm talking about tone and temperature, and I'm talking about all those things that I felt like I needed to get stronger at when I left school. In the course, we use a limited palette, just three colors, just red, yellow and blue. When mixed properly, you can just use those three colors to paint any skin tone.

I want to take away this idea that you need brown out of the tube to paint people with brown skin, and that there's a pink flesh tone for people with fairer skin tones. It's like, no, just take a beautiful rainbow and navigate that color wheel accordingly, and any skin tone can be made from the simplest start. When my Students come to me, they're specifically coming to meet their skin painting challenges or their portrait painting challenges.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Tabitha Whitley. She's an artist whose work is appearing at the Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Artist exhibition is on display now. Her work's up until January 26th. Your studio's in Bushwick, yes?

Tabitha Whitley: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What kind of state of mind do you have to be in to paint? Do you like quiet? Do you like music? What do you like?

Tabitha Whitley: It varies. I think inspiration is for amateurs. You have to treat art like it's a job. You have to show up whether you're in the mood or not. But I definitely have backgrounds that I'll go for. My number one is audiobooks because I'll be painting for hours, so podcasts aren't long enough for me. I need like a 30-hour book that I can listen to for three days, honestly. But sometimes, I'll be in a mood where I want to feel like there are people in the room with me and I'll just put the TV on in the background. It can't be something I've never seen before.

Sometimes I might be like I'm in the mood to just have aliens playing behind me. I want that Sigourney Weaver energy. It's strange. Whatever I feel like I need to hear, or maybe it's a music day, but whatever I need, that is what must be in the background. I can't predict what it'll be, but that'll be my support to keep my energy up, but it is a job, so I treat it like a job. I love it, but I'm not going to wait for the paintings to tell me it's time.

Alison Stewart: You're a native New Yorker?

Tabitha Whitley: I am.

Alison Stewart: What were your emotions when you first walked into the Brooklyn Museum and saw your piece on the wall?

Tabitha Whitley: It's going to make me emotional just thinking about it. It meant so, so much. It's not just that I was born in Brooklyn, my mother was, and my grandmother, and her father, and his mother, and his mother. I found a census of my grandmother's grandmother from 1915. To think about my family being in New York for over 100 years, coming up from the South, trying to work their way up from being housekeepers, to MTA workers, to office workers, and now for me to be the generation that gets to make the choice to have this unstable, no guarantees, creative career and then to feel embraced by my city, by my borough in that way was just one of the most meaningful affirmations that's happened in my career so far.

It was a very emotional moment because I know the Great Hall. I know that space. I've seen lots of pieces there and usually pieces from hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. To see my piece on the wall, especially that they chose a spot that's really close to where you first come in, I was just honored floored. It's still hitting me, but yes, all that is to say it means a lot, like a lot a lot.

Alison Stewart: You can see Botanic Luncheon at The Brooklyn Museum and know it was done by Tabitha Whitley. She has been my guest. It is so nice to meet you.

Tabitha Whitley: You too. Thank you so much for having me.