“It becomes timeless”: Dave White’s category-defying animal portraits

Looking at I See Your Soul by Dave White, it is difficult to focus on anything but the eyes of the gorilla who looks out of the paper, fixed on something in the middle-distance. The work is part of a new series of animal portraits in charcoal, mixed media, and oil titled Devotion. If you do manage to break eye contact, you will notice how chaotic the image becomes as it gets further away from those eyes, almost giving way to complete abstraction at its edges. In the eye of a storm of brushstrokes, the eyes bring a unique-yet-familiar sense of peace. When I speak with the artist, I quickly learn that this is no mistake: “when you have that little moment of connection with an animal,” he says, “it becomes timeless”. To me, the drawing itself seems timeless in a certain way, too.

White’s practice exists outside of the dynamics and dialectics that pervade so much of today’s art. I won’t state a claim about when contemporary art began - or even exactly what defines it - but I think it is safe to say that, in the last 100-or-so years, the subject of a lot of art has become more complex. In their work, artists are engaged in debates about just what art is or what it should be. They comment on the function of art and how its form should - or shouldn’t - follow such a function. These conversations have become the true subject of a lot of contemporary art, turning what the viewer sees in the image itself into a kind of accessory to represent a statement or question within the debate. Looking at White’s work, the subject doesn’t seem like a stand-in or a rhetorical tool. It feels more sincere.

This is not to say that the work is particularly straightforward; as he puts it, “they’re not just pretty paintings of animals and they never have been.” White has always been an animal lover, but he wants to achieve something more elusive than simply showing the viewer how impressive his subjects are. He wants to recreate those timeless instances of connection between human and animal. “You can just see right through to their soul,” he says, “my job is to try and do my best to capture those moments.” In this pursuit, he borrows from the toolboxes of art movements across history. In the Devotion series, we see the painterly strokes and splatters of Abstract Expressionism, the painstaking realism of academic art and much in between. During our conversation, the artist talks in the same breath about the discipline required to paint realistically (oil paint, he tells me, is a “cruel, cruel mistress”) and the need to “push forward and break through” the demands of realism to capture a subject with the kind of psychological intimacy that he does.

He likens his practice to being a martial artist or musician insofar as, today, he still approaches it with an openness to learning and development. Perhaps this is what allows him to pick up stylistic and technical motifs from across movements and time periods in the history of art, continually moving his practice forward rather than being defined by one particular category. As he puts it, “the last thing I would want to become would be a parody of myself.” Ultimately, this is what sets White apart: by committing to capturing his subject faithfully, deferring the questions and claims about art that so many others are preoccupied with, he allows himself to develop constantly as an artist. “I’m just trying to make beautiful things,” he tells me, “and I see beauty in everything.”