About the artist

Since my serendipitous launch in that first gallery, my paintings have been exhibited in numerous large and small galleries in the UK and beyond, with originals held in private collections across three continents, prints sold worldwide via several print on demand models and all of my artworks licensed around the world by the prestigious Bridgeman agency with their offices in London, New York, Paris and Berlin (in fact they are now my biggest outlet). Diversification into digital art has helped my work to translate into fabric design and various other applications. As a painter, I have diversified into watercolours and acrylics, however oils remain my first love to this day.

Subjects are equally diverse, though the core theme is “light” or those moments when a rarified quality of light elevates a particular subject in a way that seems to convey a rare feeling of peace, unity, harmony, balance or quality of otherworldliness. Such moments can be as transformative as they are fleeting and my objective is to capture something of that rarified quality to my audience as a prompt to help us to all to notice many more of them in everyday life. As one purchaser of my art once told me, the way I had painted trees had taught her to look at trees in a whole new light from that moment on; it is feedback like this which inspires me to paint!

That was the summary; for the longer account of what has shaped and inspired me, read on.

Out of the cupboard

It was as though the oil paints came out to find me as they fell out of the back of a cupboard one day during a period of my life defined by complete overwhelm and the cascading, bewildering health issues that are known as fibromyalgia and ME (otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome) with the underlying issue of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. Over the next couple of decades, my health unravelled into years of chronic pain and long periods of crashing exhaustion so thank goodness for painting; it was there for me though some of the hardest times. Taking this up has been one of the primary methods used to help manage all the feelings of overwhelm that can result from living with chronic conditions and has helped enormously as a distraction from symptoms, helping me to focus on positive subjects, even when things seemed most bleak.

For years prior to that, I’d followed a winding path through various jobs and self-employment, with no particular career objective, or at least nothing that gave me a real sense of purpose or enjoyment. I obtained an English degree (whilst sharing a house with a bunch of fine art students…which strongly hints at where my heart really lay) followed by various different roles, including art gallery assistant, exhibition and corporate hospitality project manager, owner of a small editorial and admin business and, finally, a highly stressful and unsuitable corporate job that pushed me to the very brink of burnout. I was feeling ever-more jaded and overwhelmed by life, reaching a point where my health burned-out utterly with stress and then I "crashed" into health issues. Suddenly, I was forced to stop everything to focus on my recovery.

The day when the oil paints, as yet never unwrapped from their box, tumbled out of the cupboard felt like a metaphor for my life to date. Somewhere down the line, all my creative aspirations had been pushed to the very back of all the jumbled, accidental, twists and turns of my life to date and it was as though I didn't know how to get back to who I once was or to what truly made me feel happy, inspired or fulfilled the way I had been as a highly creative teenager…until those paints landed on the floor, inspiring me to use them.

Yet something told me to unscrew the lids on those tubes of colour and  make the first tentative marks on a blank white surface, which was in the Spring of 2006, when I was still working full time but with my health getting worse all the time, yet painting felt like some form of therapy, soothing my nervous system for a couple of hours at a time. From that point onwards, I discovered that painting in oils came naturally and that these paints behaved in a strangely familiar way, like a half-remembered dream coming back to me. This sense of familiarity was a clue that, in a sense, I had "arrived home" and my first few snatched moments of painting at the weekends felt like they were the most contented and joyful hours in my otherwise highly stressful and bewildering life.

Six months later, after worsening health had forced me to give up full-time work, I found myself painting as often as I could between bouts of extreme fatigue and pain. In fact, painting seemed to take my mind away from pain, as though I was able to transcend it for a while. It turned out to be the most helpful thing I could do with all the time I suddenly had on my hands as I felt both productive yet calm, transfigured into a state I hadn't been in since I was the highly introverted and sensitive child that was always most happy and engrossed when making things or drawing alone in my room for hours.

My first impulse was to assume that I needed to "acquire" a technique and so I enrolled on a day's mentorship with internationally renowned artist Caroline Hulse FRSA with a view to going on to one of her longer courses once I was able to manage it. At the end of that day, Caroline told me I was a "complete natural" and should just go off home and continue to experiment so I did just that, as well as attending weekly life study sessions and a few painting workshops to hone my skills over the course of the next three years.

A chance conversation led to a very smart gallery, which I would have naturally assumed was well out of my league, asking to look at my work then inviting me to exhibit in their next exhibition, following which a demand for my work materialised and I never looked back. For a time, I had an agent and exhibited in London as well as various local galleries and art trails whilst simultaneously building my online presence (which led to some valued exposure and a clutch of awards in the USA). I was then approached by Bridgeman, who have now represented my art commercially for over a decade and via whom my work gets distributed in a myriad ways (for instance used by Vogue magazine, BBC Proms, Flammarion Publishing, the list goes on, as well as printed on cards, posters, prints and products worldwide).

Almost inevitably, my healing journey has impacted the subjects I have painted over the years: from mists and fog in the early days to burst of full radiance light and subjects such as light pouring through windows, or windows serving as a metaphor for the need to actively make a decision to invite light in to our lives through the act of opening curtains or throwing the casement open. I have explored self-portraiture and allegorical art full of symbology and, very often, my own completed artworks have conveyed important messages that I very much needed to hear as a result of subconscious information percolating through, not only the subject matter itself but, the painting progression that I have been taken through, such as at times when I have added then removed various layers, sometimes using friction to pare back layers of paint that had seemed like a good idea at the time, or when I have allowed so-called imperfections to shine through to the surface and become part of the finished article. Light streaming around an apparently solid form, softening edges, or transforming the subject has been a long-running theme. Solid seeming colours that fragment into their spectrum components and then reunify into oneness have been another running theme; a strong metaphor for the way my own life has apparently broken down in a myriad ways and then come back together, far better and much more coherent than ever before. One of my own personal coming-together moments was when I first realised and then began to accept that, in more ways than one, I am neurodivergent (an autistic, ADHD, very highly sensitive synesthete who experiences life in their own particular way) and that none of these things has ever meant that I was broken or faulty, only that I am wired uniquely, making me perfectly whole just the way I am.

Beyond the canvas

My ongoing blog Living Whole was born in 2015 to tackle the topic of dealing from chronic conditions and the underlying matter of neurodivergence that is so close to my heart. I have never given up on the belief that the journey through longterm illness is no more “chronic” than any other factor of human existence, being just a particular (if persistent) “stage” of the journey of life we are all travelling through, with the potential to change direction ever-present within all of us, just as long as we continue to believe that we are the creators of our own experience; art reminds me of this potential every day. In fact, art has inspired me to adjust my trajectory far more effectively than any other mindfulness or healing modality because it provides respite from the harsh linearity of “symptoms” whilst offering messages from my own inner wisdom that I might otherwise struggle to access, possibly because it encourages me to suspend the critical part of my mind and allow flow to happen. So often, the twists and turns of direction in my own art process have taught me powerful things about my own life that I might have otherwise overlooked, for which I am eternally grateful.

Over the years, the use of digital editing to explore subjects ripe for painting mophed into a deep love of digital processes in their own right. I found that I could work "like a painter" using these techniques when I was too unwell to manage to sit up and paint, with the added advantage of creating outcomes much more quickly and cleanly, yet still working in multiple layers as I so love to do. By doing this I was able to realise results that were often somewhat elusive or prohibitively time consuming when I used only paint and a fresh degree of satisfaction came from that at times when my ambitions demanded too much of my physical stamina. This diversification into digital art increased my range of work and took some of it into the realms of fabric design and interiors including print-on-demand luxury scarves and homeware. This all proved to be quite the entertaining excursion for a while but I am now back to using canvas or paper as my primary means of expression, preferring to pursue art as much more of a mindfulness practice than as a business model as the passing decades of my life continue to roll me towards ever-increasing mellowness, a complete lack of desire to be hurried or pressurised and the ever-present necessity (for my ongoing health) of slowing right down. There is (or should be) no hurry with art and that is its quality which I most strive to preserve!

Exhibitions and other announcements are posted on Instagram, though they have been fairly scarce since the covid era, partly due to my increasing focus upon online outlets, print on demand and licensing. Primarily, I maintain a worldwide presence via numerous print on demand partners licensed via Bridgeman. I also offer a selection of cards via With Love From the Artist and occasionally offer originals via Artfinder, although I prefer to sell hand-to-hand in my local community if I can because it feels so much more real and connected to the very reasons why I paint in the first place (I do like to feel that every painting has its rightful home; something that has been proven to be the case over and over again, based on some of the incredible stories that have unfolded). All of the relevant links can be found on my contacts page.

If you have stayed with me up to this point, I heartily thank you for your tenacity and hope that you continue to enjoy browsing the site. Do feel free to get in touch if you have any art-related comments you would like to make as I love to hear similar stories about the transformative power of art or ways that my artworks have touched people.

Helen White, 2024.