Emma Lee Whitworth lives a dual life.
By day she is a soft-spoken adjunct instructor at SWC, teaching her students the wonders of proper English diction and rhetoric.
By night she is a creator of exotic worlds, a painter turning blank canvases to richly-colored wonders.
Fiery reds burn next to sorrowful blues, conflict finding an accommodation.
While pirouetting ballerinas, basking mermaids and fuzzy creatures populate her art, the female body is front and center.
“I paint almost all nudes,” she said. “Nudity connotes vulnerability to me, but at the same time there is great strength in the female body. I am really interested in female agency, particularly in terms of ownership of the body.”
Originally from Seattle, Whitworth made her way to San Diego County to earn her Master’s in education from SDSU in 2010.
“My brother was embarking on his T.A. position as an English lecturer at Washington State University,” she said. “I helped him with some lesson plans and instantly fell in love with the prospect of teaching.”
She has been an adjunct at SWC for five years and also teaches at SDSU and San Diego City College.
Whitworth approaches her painting with creative resolve, yet she tends to be self-critical.
“I have never thought my art was good enough,” she said, “I get frustrated every time I paint. It seems more like a psychological imperative that I paint rather than something I do for fun.”
Whitworth has gone so far as to destroy her paintings, slashing at them with scissors and abandoning them in the alleyway behind where she lives.
“It is cathartic to dispose of pieces of myself,” she said. “My art often represents my emotional frustrations and I enjoy symbolically destroying them.”
Where Whitworth sees imperfections, her brother Nathanael sees beautiful chaos.
“Emma Lee’s art is bursting with passion and conflict,” he said. “It defies all rules and boundaries of realistic representation and proportion. It can be dark, troubled and disturbing, or serene and picturesque.”
Whitworth’s friend Michael Richardson agrees.
“Her paintings are sad,” he said, “yet there is something so beautiful about that life within the sadness that endures for the light to pierce the veil. Her artwork captures that feeling so well.”
Whitworth said her process is just as chaotic as her subjects.
“I usually stretch out on the floor, close my eyes and let the paintbrush do what it wants,” she said. “I then try to make sense of it adding little by little. Often I’ll work on several pieces at the same time, because my mind hops between ideas.”
The most striking of Whitworth’s paintings features a woman that looks just like her, crying at the viewer. Her large green eyes plead for asylum as thick black lines of mascara run down her pale cheeks. Her mouth is frozen mid-shout, becoming a dark void as her cries of pain go unheeded. The woman’s pale skin shines like a spectral ghost drowning in a sea of dark blue.
“I express my pain and frustration through my art,” she said. “Yet expression can be very exhausting and I don’t always like what I find when letting it all out. So I often shut down and refuse to express myself.”
Another painting depicts a nude couple, the man cradling the woman in his arms as they bear mournful faces. His eyes are closed as his lips lightly kiss the woman’s head, arms wrapped tightly around her waist while she looks off into the distance of the blue room, uncertain of what future the two might make. Their bed is surrounded by the black outlines of curly haired women with long, thin legs, like Dalian elephants.
This painting was born out of a difficult time for Whitworth, based on a past relationship.
“Quite a few paintings came out of this,” she said. “It was at a point when I was my most vulnerable. There was inevitable loss and I tried to capture that.”
Her loss, say her fans, is our gain.