Oil on aluminum panel, 40 × 50 cm, 2023, Paris
I’m an American painter based in France and a recently naturalized French citizen.
For several years I have been developing a project which I call “Early Man”, conceived of in Boston where I was employed in the sculptural rehabilitation of the gorilla habitat of the Franklin Park Zoo, necessitated by the escape of a western lowland gorilla named Little Joe. Twice.
Upon emigrating to France my project evolved to include portraits of Great Apes, chimpanzees and gorillas, nesting within fragments of the flattened, ornamental floral imagery of Art Nouveau. It serves to place me in my adopted country, the land where early man first recorded his artistic endeavour for posterity. Those depictions were notably of animals, and not himself.
I was raised by a working artist, my Father David Omar White, and received my BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1997, continuing my studies at the Villa Maria Centre for the Arts in Perugia, Italy, and Studio Escalier in Paris. I live and work in Fontenay-sous-Bois.
Legacy & Lineage
David Omar White (1927–2009) was himself a painter. His work is held in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Boston Public Library, Rutgers University, and the University of Minnesota. He received the ARTSmedia Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 and the Chicago Tribune Critics Award in 1970, and exhibited for more than forty years at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, as well as at the Genovese/Sullivan Gallery in Boston. His work is featured in the book “100 Boston Painters” (Schiffer Publishing, 2012).
It was alongside him that Jonny White learned to paint. During the 2021 lockdown, in Fontenay-sous-Bois, he made this self-portrait, painted directly over a portrait of his father — a gesture that layers two generations of painters onto a single canvas.
Painting runs in the family.
Discover the full body of my work in the gallery.