Susan Dorothea White (born 10 August 1941) is an Australian artist and author. She is a narrative artist and her work concerns the natural world and human situation, increasingly incorporating satire and irony to convey her concern for human rights and equality. She is the author of Draw Like da Vinci (2006).
Education and early career
Born in Adelaide, South Australia on 10 August 1941, White grew up in the outback mining town of Broken Hill. She started boarding school in Adelaide in 1954, returning home to Broken Hill during school vacations to paint and draw. White first exhibited in 1957; in 1958, while still at school in Adelaide, she began accepting commissions and attended Saturday drawing classes conducted by the artist James Cant, who together with his wife Dora Chapman, had settled permanently in Adelaide in 1956. From 1959 to mid-1960, White was a student in the Diploma of Fine Art program at the South Australian School of Art. At SASA, White was initiated in art appreciation by Dora Chapman who taught her "a broad range of skills including perspective projection". White also learnt lithography from Udo Sellbach. Adelaide art critic Elizabeth Young described White's work in the 1959 exhibition Painters and Sculptors of Promise, organised by the Royal South Australian Society of Arts, as "an able landscape impression".
White was a regular prize-winner in the annual Broken Hill exhibitions from 1959 to 1962. With other artists such as Florence May Harding, Pro Hart, and Sam Byrne (painter), White was a foundation member of the Willyama Art Society and participated in its Broken Hill and Adelaide exhibitions in 1961 and 1962. Her portrait of Mr. H.L.C. Cotton, father of the Australian senator Bob Cotton, was described as "strongly painted...outstanding".
In July 1960, White moved to Sydney to continue full-time studies at the Julian Ashton Art School under its principal teacher Henry Gibbons. She also attended evening classes at the National Art School, in sculpture under Lyndon Dadswell and in drawing. White held her first solo exhibition in 1962 at age 20 at the Technical College in Broken Hill; this exhibition comprised 60 works and included oil and watercolour paintings, drawings, lithographs, and etchings. Praising the quality of her work, Harding wrote: "Bowing to no popular ism or formula except hard work, practice and observation, Susan White turned to our countryside with the fresh vision and vigor of youth. In her pictures it is all there – the red clay, erosion, bramble wattles bursting in bloom, the 'little creeks', big gums, struggling roots, wispy foliage, dry white grass, the silver sheen of the saltbush, dark rocky outcrops... Miss White's exhibition...is a must for all Broken Hill art lovers". In 1963, Sydney critic Daniel Thomas described her landscape painting as "good in its curious Victorian way".
Painting
White's earliest paintings are mostly oils on composition board and watercolours. In the 1970s she changed from oils to the use of acrylics on wood panel. She developed skill in a painting technique "that produces nuance in colour and subtle gradations in tones. The basis of the method is the application of successive washes of acrylic colour to the wood with light sanding of the surface between each wash." The New York critic Andrew Margolis described White's more recent paintings as exploring "the most intimate experiences of her life, as well as more topical subjects, in meticulously limned acrylic paintings on wood panels. Her ability to examine unflinchingly such personal milestones as her surgery for a benign brain tumor with a dazed self-portrait in a vertiginously askew hospital setting results in some of the most emotionally jarring narrative imagery in recent art". Some of White's acrylic paintings incorporate collage.