The Cornwall Library is excited to begin its 2025 art shows with Hotspot, Kit White’s dramatic and innovative paintings prompted by recent California wildfires. As White worked on the paintings, his daughter in San Francisco was sending home vivid images of the lurid, smoke-filled air outside her taped-up windows. The paintings were his response to her apocalyptic scenario.
Though at first the paintings can seem wholly abstract, close inspection reveals a black and white photograph of a wildfire embedded in each, creating a layered space that reveals itself slowly. The result is a startlingly eloquent reaction to the fire, and by extension to climate change.
The embedded image results from a unique process developed by the Eastman Company in Rochester. It begins with a digital photograph White manipulates and then transfers via inkjet printer onto a giant sheet of mylar. After White puts down a base layer of oil paint, he treats his canvas with a solution that lifts the photograph from the mylar onto the painted canvas. He then overlays the “ghost” image embedded in the painting with more oil paint. The effect is more akin to an 1860s-era glass plate photograph, with its imperfections, than to a crisp contemporary image, suggesting the porousness and mutability of memory.
White says “This particular method of working, with a spectral photo embedded in the painting, began with the Iran-Iraq war, when I started thinking that most people get their sense of the world from photographs, not direct experience. It seemed, then, that if I wanted to address the physical world, I had to acknowledge the role of photography in creating our sense of a place.”
Kit White is a New York-based artist and writer who studied Fine Arts at Harvard and was professor of Painting at the Pratt Institute for 21 years. He has had many solo exhibitions and his work is in the collections of museums including The Guggenheim Museum, The M, The Weisman Art Museum, The Johnson Art Museum, the Luther Brady Collection, (formerly, The Corcoran Museum), and others. In 1979, he received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award for painting. He is the author of 101 Things to Learn in Art School and his work is the subject of a monograph, Kit White, Line Into Form, by critic Carter Ratcliff.
He and his wife, writer Andrea Barnet, have been familiar figures in Cornwall for many years. Tennis fans in Cornwall may recall his landscapes on trophies at the Cream Hill Lake Association during the early 1990s.
