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K St Revolving Door, 2008
oil on linen, 30 x 40"
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Renwick Gallery, 1986
oil on linen, 64 x 48"
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Venice Boat, 1984
oil on linen, 80 x 120"
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K Street, 2008
oil on linen, 40 x 60"
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Apartment Building Washington DC, 2009
oil on linen, 40 x 30"
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Collins Avenue 2, 2008
watercolor, 13 x 19"
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Collins Avenue 1, 2008
watercolor, 13 x 19"
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K Street Island, 2008
watercolor, 13 x 19"
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Cool Diagonal, 2006
watercolor, 9 x 13"
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Artist Statement
I've been painting all my life. I've never done anything else. Well, I worked as a fry cook for about 33 hours over 3 weeks in college. Then I retired.
- Joseph P White
Focus of energy – the act of painting concentration into the clarity of the gestalt – presented as realized by cubic principles of the two-dimensional patterns of the three-dimensional patterned states of matter. Seen from one point; produced by ritual; the manipulation of materials by touch. The product is the record of the dance. The point, the transfer of energy, is the content. But what else? In the variation of the wave in the waves that an even communicate delusion the art is its size in the past; the present less than a dent. The art the mime moment, a man making his mark, the manipulation of light and space matching the dimensions by pushing the concentration in the movement, the matching realities matching the waves of the subject of the picture’s form: the ritual. These harmonies stream from the conceptions of the situation, each finding origin in the chance and inspiration of the everyday. The structures of color systems, the thought as unique as the lines making the parts, the contours of color are gestures read as styles – the product of a process.
- Joseph P White, ca 1974
Essays/Monograph
Biography
CV
born 1938 San Mateo, CA
education1963 B.A. San Francisco State University, CApublic collections
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DCNational Gallery of Art, Washington DCSan Francisco Museum of Art, CAWhitney Museum of American Art, New York
Reviews
Washington Post
by Paul Richard
December 14, 1974
"Go see the new Joe Whites"
Bonnie, 1974. oil on linen, 42 x 44"
Swimming Pool, 1975 oil on linen, 42 x 40"
I'd been given that advice half a dozen times before. I saw the works in question. Joseph White is 36. He's not a local artist - he now lived in New York, he's earned a reputation here as a painter's painter. Weeks before it opened his exhibition at Jane Haslem's, 2121 P ST.NW, was one of the most talked about one-man shows in town.
The excitement is understandable. Joe White's work has changed. He used to paint abstractions, now he paints the real. The pictures on display present an unexpected synthesis of new and older art.
Like other painters of his age, White grew up with abstract art. The heroes of his youth were paintings who had fled from oils and the figure and the oppression of tradition. Rare indeed was the artist who moved the other way.
White has done just that, There are landscapes in his show, and still lifes, and extraordinary portraits. Yet nothing here seems retrogressive. Instead, these pictures seem part of a continuum that indicates the future while acknowledging the past.
Technically these works are flawless. The images he paints - of gardens, swimming pools and kangaroos, Connecticut Avenue monuments, cloud-filled skies, museums - have surfaces as smooth as silk. White will mix as many as 90 different colors for a single painting and he works with oil paint.
There is something both of Europe and of '60s California, in the works on view. Oil is an ancient medium, but White uses it to paint forms as smooth and shiny as the fenders of the most extravagant West Coast custom cars.
His scale is are remarkable. Most of the works on view are three or four feet square. By contemporary standards that isn't very bog, but these pictures have enormous presence. They devour walls.
But the oddest thing about them is their disturbing mix of strangeness and refinement, No errors mark these pictures. Everything seems polished and entirely intentional. Then what is it about them that makes them seem so weird? Even when he paints buildings one has seen or faces one knows well, nothing that he shows us seems familiar. The answer is, I think, that no other artist sees the way he sees. Or uses such peculiar colors. His colors are most finely tuned. His trees are green, a hundred greens, but I have never seen such trees, and his water is transparent, but there are colors in its clearness.
It is his masterly of subtle, and occasionally outrageous color that has made him such a favorite among the painter of this city. Washington's Jim Tanner, hung the works at Haslem's. The show is impressive, and thoroughly professional.
Go see the new Joe Whites.
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