Daniel White, director of the Paul R. Jones Museum and The University of Alabama Gallery, usually oversees the exhibitions of other artists. Now, White is part of a two-person show that includes his own artwork at the Kentuck Art Center’s Museum Gallery on Main Avenue in Northport, Alabama. The exhibition, titled Face to Face, is open now. An in-person reception will be held Thursday, November 5, during Kentuck’s Art Night, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. Registration is required. The exhibition will be up through November 23, 2020.
White shares the gallery space with Jon Osborne, a Birmingham-based artist. The exhibition spotlights the two artists’ portrait painting and aims to create a conversation around their different – yet related – styles, inspirations, and techniques. Osborne paints using storytelling, psychology, theory, and meditation, according to the Kentuck site, to illustrate his view of “the uncontrollable world around us while seeing the beauty in it.” White paints what he calls “intuitive portraiture. Each painting is unique unto itself through color, art historical reference, scale or style,” he said. “My goal was to create a body of work specifically for this show that is distinct from what I’ve painted before.”
Daniel White has painted most of his life but focused on ceramics for his BFA (University of Montevallo) and MFA (Rochester Institute of Technology) degrees. After graduate school, while pursuing a career in teaching and then museum work, White said, he moved back to painting. Since then, while still painting, “ceramics has had a big impact on my 2-D painting, as the imagery I do now is derived from ceramics. The faces that recur in my paintings directly reference the imagery found on historical Chinese and Japanese ceramics. The texture I put into the work is directly from texture applications I enjoyed working in ceramics. I like to think it’s come full circle. I don’t see it anymore as an either/or between the mediums of painting and ceramics, but rather the constant pursuit of a creative life.”
The Museum Gallery at Kentuck Art Center is located at 503 Main Avenue Northport, Alabama. Hours are Monday-Friday, 10:00 am-12:00 pm; 1:00-4:00 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 12:00-4:00 pm. For more information, call (205)-758-1257.
For more information about The University of Alabama’s programs in art history and studio art, visit our Degree Programs page.