About Me
Greetings, my name is Adam White. I’m a fine artist and 'neo-petrifactionist’ currently anchored to Stroud Valleys Artspace.
I make gigantic experimental watercolours. My work may clash with the traditional expectations of watercolour. I’ve won prizes and exhibited widely. I welcome new opportunities to show.
I’ve been hammering into the veins of my work for years, dressing thoughts down into precious ore and wading through decades of paint. I don’t want my work to be modern or old but it must expand what is possible. If cornered by an aggressive viewer, I’d rather be compared to some anonymous prehistoric painter than the Chapman Brothers. I‘m determined to vault factory-pressed artwork and the familiar ruse of the branding market on the public. I aim to concentrate truth, often mining my own pigments and making paint to forge a direct connection with the past. I source tourmaline and malachite from Cornwall, iron pigments from the Forest of Dean. If needed, azurite and lapis lazuli from mineral dealers, if they’re friendly and not armed.
Here and there, I've been unexpectedly compelled to make sculptural work. This has been illuminated by my latent interests which encompass hunting down fossiliferous strata, mineral and cowrie collecting, herpetology, angling and being lost inside the world represented in my fish-tank as a child.
In a possibly errant search for a deeper connection with time and our place in it I’ve developed a profound interest in fossil marine reptiles and ancient sharks. I‘ve crawled like a mad lizard on the Jurassic seabed, finding an Ichthyosaur and a quarter in Gloucestershire, dinosaur footprints, stumbled on coral reefs, fossil sharks' fin-spines and their resplendent teeth, a gigantic carboniferous tree, trilobites, ammonite graveyards, and a cache of minerals sealed in the rock.
I want to know what makes these things beautiful, I no longer believe that beauty is a societal construct or some vestigial remnant of a biological urge.
Archaeology, history and politics also inform my work as does life. I’ve been decisively blessed by soul-cleaving illness since I was a boy and have faced extinction more than one might politely expect before breakfast. This compels an urgency in my work. Any personal circumstances I mine and try to make universal. The work is about you.