An Inherently Paintable Moment

An Interview with Artist Roger White

Roger White is an artist and writer who lives in New York and Vermont. His oil paintings and watercolors use the traditional techniques of still life observational painting to create gentle imagery of Brita water bottles, mirrors, clothing, and abstraction.  With Dushko Petrovich he co-founded Paper Monument, a journal and publisher of writing about art that replaces the academicisms and formalities of art writing with a broader, looser approach to the subject of visual culture. Recently, he published his first book, The Contemporaries, a panoramic view of the art world that serves as both an introduction to non-art folk and a refreshingly balanced approach for any art insiders who have lost perspective on the bigger picture. 

—Ross Simonini

THE BELIEVER: How did the mirror painting series begin?

ROGER WHITE: In 2009 I was with my wife in Taipei. She was there on a grant during the summer. It was very, very hot and humid, and I didn’t speak any Chinese, and so I spent a lot of time in the apartment, a tiny little apartment near Daan Park. I would go downstairs to the 7-Eleven to get those little triangular seaweed-and-rice snacks, and come back up and just make watercolors. The bathroom had terrible pink and purple tiles, and a little oval mirror, which was always fogged due to the constant humidity. I made a watercolor of it, and then every nine months or a year since then, I’ve thought, “Oh I should do something with that.”

So last year I took up the project again with a little more rigor. I set about trying to reconstruct that image, away from the actual site—since I wasn’t likely to get back to Taipei and rent that same apartment again. I started by making a painting from the watercolor, which didn’t work out at all. There was too little information. Then I started re-drawing it, asking myself, “How far away was I from the wall? What were the colors like? How high off the ground was the shelf?” Doing that, you realize how little you actually remember about something. Especially after you’ve committed it to some other form, a drawing or a photograph.

BLVR: The art makes you forget.

RW: Yeah. So first I tried to re-imagine the situation, working purely from memory. Next, I set up a shelf and some objects and gridded off the wall…

BLVR: You recreated it?

RW: Yeah. Eventually. I bought a mirror, built a wall, tiled it, installed a glass shelf, and did drawings from that. I did that twice, actually, because I moved studios. I got very fussy...