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 convey something of that rarified quality to my audience as a prompt to help them remember to notice them more often 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 and it is this kind of feedback that helps inspire me to keep on painting.

That was the summary; for the longer account of what has shaped and inspired me, please 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 can arise from having Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome plus Fibromyalgia with a side-order of chronic fatigue syndrome and dysautonomia. 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. This has been one of my primary methods for managing the frequent 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 hints quite strongly at where my heart really was) followed by various different employed and self-employed personas, including art gallery assistant, commercial exhibition and corporate hospitality project manager, owner of a small editorial and admin business and, finally, a quite unsuitable and highly stressful corporate job that pushed me to the very brink of burnout. 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 internationally and a clutch of American Art Awards after I was invited to submit work by the president of the award scheme). I was then approached by Bridgeman Images, 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, to name but a few, as well as printed on cards, posters, prints and products worldwide). Through the internet I have sold original artworks to people in America, Australia and more than one country in Europe and one of my art prints was recently spotted in the shop of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.

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 make a proactive decision to invite light into our lives (represented by open or flowing curtains or windows left ajar). 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. Examples of this are those 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 but which eventually show themselves to be a hindrance to my overall purpose, or when I have allowed so-called imperfections of “the past” 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, which my artistic outlook helped me to get to, was when I first realised and accepted that, in more ways than just my hypermobile body, I am made differently (since I am a neurodivergent, very highly sensitive synesthete who experiences life in their own particular way). None of these things has ever meant that I was broken or faulty but only that I am “wired” uniquely, meaning that I am 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 with, and learning from, chronic health conditions and the underlying matter of neurodivergence emerging out of that health picture, as it surely has. 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 the life we are all busily travelling through, with the potential to suddenly change direction being ever-present within all of us. Art has taught me the importance of realising that we are all the creators of our own experience; something which the act of creating art reminds me of every single day because the stages can be so similar - its so often what you focus on and how you see it that manifests the end product. In fact, art has inspired me to adjust my trajectory towards positive outcomes far more frequently and effectively than any other mindfulness or healing modality ever could 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 art process have taught me powerful things about my own life that I might have otherwise overlooked and, when I am in a flowing-creative state, I often reach moments of insight that would likely struggle to crystalise in my mind if I were to remain more fixated with my often frustrating, more mundane, everyday experiences thwarted by disability and pain. For this reason, I am forever grateful to art and it is the main reason I “do” it, not to chase down success or a source of income.

Over the years, the use of digital editing to explore subjects ripe for painting morphed 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 or create mess, with the added advantage of creating outcomes much more quickly, yet still working in multiple layers as I so love to do. By doing this, I was able to realise results that were often elusive or prohibitively time consuming when I used only paint and a fresh degree of satisfaction came from this new process 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 cashmere-silk 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 surfaces, 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 the ever-increasing mellowness of the third age, where a complete lack of desire to be hurried or pressurised and the ever-present necessity (for my ongoing health) of slowing right down without deadlines is the key requisite. There is absolutely no hurry when it comes to art art and that’s the quality I adore!

Exhibitions and other announcements are posted on Instagram, though these have been more scarce since the covid era, partly due to my increasing focus upon online outlets, print on demand and licensing (however, I will be opening my studio in May 2025 as part of OS Notts so check out their website). Primarily, I maintain a worldwide presence via numerous print on demand partners licensed via Bridgeman and my own print partners at pixels.com. I also offer a selection of cards via With Love From the Artist. All other website links can be found on my contacts page.

If you have stayed with me to this point, I 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, I love to hear about ways that my artworks have touched people in positive ways, of which kind of anecdote I now have quite a collection.

Helen White, 2025.