Erik Daniel White

Erik Daniel White grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. He received a BS in Art Practices from Portland State University in the Spring of 2013 and an MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the Spring of 2019. He currently lives and works in the New York, Hudson Valley region.

Erik attentively paints hastily formed figures, symbols, objects, and scenes that were modeled with never-dry clay. He paints the malleable character of the clay by depicting its bumps, marks and dents, which emphasizes the fragility, impermanence, and the physical construction of the forms. Those visual attributes serve as a metaphor for the tenuous social construction of the concepts within the chosen imagery. To create his images, he builds clay up and physically moves it around—in a similar way, ideas and concepts get built up, manipulated, and changed over time. Many of his  paintings serve as a cultural critique and a meditation on some of America’s attitudes towards the environment, food consumption, peace, liberty, tax policies, religion, and our obsession with competition; they allude to political failures, and national shortcomings. Images of home, money, war and timid human figures evoke our shared cultural landscapes of projected and received concepts that should not hold sway over our hearts, minds and imaginations but somehow always do.

By starting with the medium of clay, he employs a playful approach that serves as an effective tool to broach challenging and weighty subjects. The tactile and malleable nature of clay appeals to the viewer's senses, promoting a sense of familiarity with Claymation and early childhood experiments in arts and crafts. This approach becomes a way through which he can engage in conversations about complex and difficult topics that might otherwise evoke defensiveness or avoidance.

Artist Website