ARTIST FEATURE 15: CONOR WHITE

Tuesday 15 May 2018



It's our Artist Feature numero 15, and today we're talking to the wonderful Conor White. Conor is an artist living in Brighton, currently in his last year of Fine Art Painting. Working large scale, and with a bright, bold colour palette, Conor's practice revolves around primarily around mental health; his interest in the development of understanding his insecurities, and his feelings about the stigmatic world of toxic masculinity. 

Give us your name, tell us a bit about yourself, what do you do and how you would describe your work?
My name is Conor White, I am a young British artist currently studying Fine Art Painting at the University of Brighton.

When did you start creating art?
I have been making art since I was a school boy, developing a real love for drawing and later, for acrylic painting as my studies in GCSE and A-Level developed. It was what I was best at and I had no real other ambitions other than continuing to make art into university and beyond.

You're a painter, primarily. Have you ever experiemented with any other styles or medias?
I studied at the Royal Drawing School for my foundation. There, I learnt and experimented with photography, animation, sculpture and printmaking. However, since being at the University of Brighton, I have primarily been painting and drawing, but I have ambitions to get back into printmaking and even film making!

Chameleon Fears - Oil on Canvas, 209cm x 178cm


What is about painting that really appeals to you?
The paint in general really excites me! Mixing up large amounts of it and playing around with it to see the forms and colours I can make from it is a really interesting activity! Being able to capture what is happening in my mind also helps me work out my own mental landscapes, thoughts and feelings about my everyday life for other people to understand really helps me capture myself.

Where do you get inspiration from?
My inspiration comes from my feelings and surroundings. I paint a lot about the emotions I experience in regards to my life. Painting about things that make me sad, or painting things that reference my anxieties helps me to delve into my own mind, grasp onto these feelings and find something beautiful from the pain.

I also paint a lot about how my relationships with women have affected me, and how lost love and loneliness really play on my mind. I want to fight against the societal idea that men can’t be sad or depressed. Toxic masculinity is a serious threat to men’s mental health. It's caused so many deep rooted social issues, most prominently, that suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK. I want my art to be a confession of my depressed state of mind, so that others  who have felt similarly to me can maybe find comfort and understanding in them.

Wanderer - Oil on Canvas, 148cm x 148cm


So, do you think Art is a good medium for questioning social issues like mental health? 
It’s an excellent platform for questioning the world around us. Painting for example, has been a way of questioning, reacting and expressing the world for hundreds of years! Paintings, if looked after properly, can outlast the exact issues they were painted to question. Paintings can last hundreds of years whilst most governments, social issues and gender issues wont. Paintings become records of a world long changed, something important for current and future generations to understand and appreciate.

 Would you say you try and get specific themes across in your work?
Mortality and death is a big theme in my work. I've created many pieces revolving around my dad’s lung cancer, repeatedly painting lungs in several of my pieces as a representative motif for my fears, and for a very real cause of pain and sadness in my life. Recently, a lot of my themes have been a bit more varied, focusing on women, loneliness, and my fears around growing up and having a family.

Cupid - Oil on Canvas, 185cm x 205cm

Would you say that your personality is strongly reflected in your work then?
My work is a reflect of my emotional self.

How do you overcome creative blocks?
To overcome a creative block, I will sometimes rethink the current pieces I have been working on. I do this by either flipping the piece onto its side, taking an image of it and sketching onto the printed image with pastels to see if I can somehow work into it more. Most of the time however, I like to work on something new, because after a while of having your head cleared, remerging yourself in the previous piece becomes so much easier than if you over thought your actions and did nothing!

Which is more important to you, the original concept behind the work, or the way it is executed?  
 Perhaps the way it is executed, as I could have an idea develop for months in my sketchbooks but it’s not until I set out creating it to scale that it really breaths life. For example, some of my recent works are from sketches I made over a year ago when I was in a particularly depressing state of mind. These paintings really resonate with me now that they’re in large scale having applied the paint across the surface, stood back and seen them enveloped in emotion that they really become what I set out for them to be.

Paradox - Oil on Canvas
Can you tell us a little about living in Brighton? Would you say that living in Brighton has encouraged you to create more?
Brighton is amazing. Living here surrounded but such a vibrant arts scene, people, music and the sea itself inspires me daily to create my art. Being from an east London town with no art galleries or local projects to promote artists, then to leap into university in one of the most exciting cities in the UK has really expanded my mind creatively! I honestly don’t want to leave!

Who are your favourite artists?
I find similarities between my practice and Edvard Munch’s Frieze of Life series, where he depicted his own anxiety and insecurities to try and grasp at the greater purpose of his work – to find clarity in himself and for others. Georg Baselitz, Roy Oxlade, Rose Wylie and Ken Kiff also resonate with me and my practice, expressing their successful image making with such conviction that their works breath a life of their own through the paint is something I desire to achieve within my own painting.




What are your plans for the next year? Do you have any exhibitions/viewings or collabs coming up?
After graduating, I’m planning on staying down in Brighton another year and creating work when I can. I’m hoping to find a studio in Brighton where I can continue to create paintings at the scale I enjoy and can express myself enough with! I will continue to make work with or without a studio really! I really aspire to get back into drawing, sketching people around Brighton and from life models in classes, as I feel it’s something I’ve missed in my painting practice recently.
                 
Additionally, my artwork will be on exhibit at the University of Brighton 2018 Graduate Show from June 2nd – 10th at the university’s’ Grande Parade campus. I invite you all to come and see my paintings and other works of art! This will be an exciting experience and I can’t wait to see how everything with finally come together! I have ambitions to have more exhibitions over the next year in Brighton, learning more about the business and process of setting up shows is something id highly enjoy the development of!

You can follow @conorwhiteartist_ and @conorwhiteartwork_ for updates on his artwork and practice!

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