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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Arts / City / Theater Remembering the Brilliance of Edie Whitsett

Posted by David Schmader on Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 2:06 PM

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In this week's Theater Lead, I get to spill some ink on the specific brilliance of Edie Whitsett, the Seattle scenic artist who passed away last week. Most of the heavy lifting is done by Ming Cho Lee, the American theater legend/Yale School of Drama professor who I phoned in New York and who was eager to fill me in on what made Edie so special:

Where you can tell if a scenic artist is a good artist is when you have a backdrop that involves a lot of figurative painting. People who've strictly learned scenic painting know all the techniques—marbleizing, wood-graining, architecture—but when it comes to drawing people, they fall apart. For [Pacific Northwest Ballet's The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet], we had a backdrop with a lot of human figures, and [PNB] didn't think Seattle had artists who could do it, so it was farmed out to a well-known scenic painter in Canada. We spent a lot of money to have it painted by this famous scenic artist, and he did a wretched job. We were at a loss of what to do, and someone suggested Edie as a person to correct it. And she corrected it! It was remarkable. She can paint things in all periods and styles, and it will be better than anyone else can do it.

In addition to a top-tier artist, Edie was a deeply beloved human, as this lovely personal remembrance by Jim Jewell on Seattlest makes clear.

You can read my whole Edie piece here.