“Are we carried by something godly, shaped by something extraterrestrial, or moving quietly, only ever spirits passing through?” - Brooklyn Whelan

Someone Great marks a profound turning point in Brooklyn Whelan’s practice. For the first time, his entire body of work has been realised in oil, a shift that mirrors a broader transition in his art: away from 80s futurism and celestial abstractions, toward landscapes pulled from the topography he has walked and now reimagines.

Shaped by the past two years of his life, Whelan’s hikes are both subject and metaphor: photographs taken along the way serve as starting points, recreated as luminous terrains that blur the line between his complex internal and external world.

His palette remains characteristically atmospheric, but it is now sharpened by a delicate kind of intimacy; less about spectacle and more about interiority. Oils grant him the ability to render the atmosphere with dexterity—radiant skies dissolve into brooding horizons, melancholic valleys melt into darker, more unrecognisable terrains.

The maturation in Whelan’s practice is a welcome surprise. Neon skies have been tempered by the weight of lived terrain and existential reflection. Once a purely formal element in his work, light now carries symbolic weight: radiance as hope, shadow as loss, chromatic gradients as the quiet passages in between. The result is a series that feels both grounded and transcendent.

These landscapes are not simple transcriptions of place. They are shifting portals where memory and imagination, light and dark, all seem to coexist. Whelan gestures toward vast, unanswerable questions. What lies beyond this life? Are we held by something divine? Or are we simply passing through? His paintings resist dogma, and instead encourage us to linger at the precipice of what is now, and what comes next. These depictions act as both mirror and witness to our universal meditations.

Someone Great offers no conclusions. Enigma, elegy or meditation; through the luminous peaks and shadowed valleys of these emotional cartographies, Whelan traces the fragile terrain between what is earthly and eternal.

Anthea Mentzalis
September, 2025