mark white
Mark White is an artist with limitless creativity and a long history of successes making art: oil paintings on canvas or metals, sculptures in figurative, non-objective, and interactive kinetic forms in copper or bronze, and paintings on metal or canvas. After earning a B.A. in Sociology and Psychology from Southern Illinois University, White studied sociology and art and eventually embarked on art as a career that would satisfy his deep appreciation for the visual poetics of movement and his need to make beautiful things. He studied with Lincoln Fox, Valentin Okorokov, and Patrick Kipper.
White has always had a strong emotional and aesthetic response to art with physically moving elements and static art that conveys or suggests movement. He begins his studio work before sunrise, a time of high energy for him and a habit begun while he was still working full-time jobs to provide for his family and simultaneously building his art career. “I had to make a living before I could create. The only way that could happen was if I got up early.”
Toward the end of the eighties, White took a ten-year hiatus from painting to focus on creating art in metals. Both of Mark and Sue White’s children are dancers. One of their daughters’ choreographers had seen Mark’s hammered copper interpretation of Sue’s silhouette in compound curves and asked Mark to create life-size versions to be carried by the dancers during performances. One was of a leaping dancer that was suspended above the dancers where it spun as they danced. White was mesmerized by the movement. He began fabricating and selling small-scale, one-of-a-kind, suspended dance figures. At an outdoor art fair in Aspen, a gust of wind sent one of the figures dancing in the wind. He resolved to harness that movement in his work. “My goal was to create sculptures as fascinating as the flames of fire.”
White felt the pull of abstract forms and began choreographing movement and countermovement in what he called parabolic gyroscopes. These have been exceptionally well-received by collectors everywhere, including President and Mrs. Gerald Ford, Gerald Arpino, co-founder and Artistic Director of the Joffrey Ballet, Madame Sophia Golovkina, Artistic Director of the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow, and the AVAYA corporate collection.
When the kinetic sculptures had reached a place of continuous high demand, White was able to return a large part of his focus his lifelong love, painting. Whatever the medium, White invites intuition, serendipity, and surprise into his creative process. Motion and fluid grace find their way into every painting.” I never wanted to be part of a movement or style. I explore constantly based on what I learned the day before. Each piece, if it’s creative at all, creates new ideas. That’s the fun of it all, to think of something new and see if I can bring it into existence..”
Mark White’s artistic output is and will always be fresh and exciting because he brings invention and innovative sprit to his artistic experiments, then absorbs and acts on the new ideas each of his previous works offers him.