Since the summer of 2022, my relationship to making has fundamentally explored ideas relating to play, formalism, craft, and gestaltism/pareidolia. These four ideas are equally weighted, taking turns in a rotation of what seems important to the making at any particular moment. 

My process typically begins by creating loose sketches using a pencil on scrap paper. The imagery is dependent upon a limited number of shapes, much of which is derived from the profiles found in a set of children’s building blocks. Sketching is critically important and foundational to how I generate composition. As if I were a child playing with blocks, I freely associate shapes, angles, spaces, and other formal items in a search for dynamic relationships. Sketches that display potential are then transcribed to wooden panels where the second stage of making takes place. 

The foundational shapes derived from my sketches now become armatures to be covered in patterns and colors. This is done by applying paint, acrylic polymer transfers, and a variety of colored foils. It should be noted that I’ve explored an array of application processes over the years. At times my technique has been purposely clumsy or very slick. Craft is integral to the making as well as to the experience of viewing a finished artwork and I acknowledge craft at every stage of development. In the end, I want the residual application processes to carryover a degree of spontaneity and play to the viewer as they take in each piece. Paul Pfeiffer said, "Craft is building a relationship to material, discovering the things it will do despite your will ... that may be more interesting than what you were initially trying to will the material to do." This quote has been a guide in the studio, allowing for chance and imperfection to find a welcomed place while working.

Gestaltism is a school of thought in psychology that states the human mind perceives objects and experiences as unified wholes rather than separate, isolated parts. This is another foundational concern when I compose an artwork, and I think it has always been present in just about everything I experience. While free association is still an element during this stage, it often becomes tapered when a mood begins to take root within a composition. As this happens, the formal elements start to operate as psychically charged informers guiding my decision making and helping develop the content of the artwork. Functionally, this is analogous to a single starling and its relationship to the larger flock. As the flock flies through the sky, it undulates and swirls, creating a murmuration of activity and spontaneous forms. Sometimes these fleeting forms look like something recognizable ... a moment of pareidolia. Pareidolia is defined as the psychological tendency to perceive a meaningful image or pattern within visual information, even when none exists. My shapes are akin to the building blocks I mentioned earlier. They are foundational elements, impactful on their own, but together they can be used to develop complex arrangements and partnerships, to build the character and content held within an artwork. 

I sometimes feel that what I’m doing in the studio is a kind of “playful formalism.” By mostly using similar ingredients: shapes, colors, and patterns, I’ve been able to develop harmonious compositions that present various moods.

“The exuberant abstractions of...Tommy White, composed of diverse forms arrayed in rhythmic counterpoint across and around the picture plane, have their source in a vision that manifests what can only be called a childlike sophistication. They subtly depend on a kind of syntax of shapes, as if the linear fragments and burgeoning silhouettes – posed against one another like collage elements but not allowed to touch – were pictograms in hieroglyphic tablets. White’s paintings effervesce with a doubled animation, an animation you can imagine projected on a screen and an animation you can feel percolating throughout life itself. White’s carefully reasoned and yet thoroughly ingratiating paintings aren’t the kind of abstractions your kid could do; they’re the kind of abstractions your kid should do.”

Peter Frank 

Senior Curator, Riverside Art Museum, California

Art Critic for LA Weekly & Angelino Magazine

• Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL   
• Capital One Financial Corporation, Richmond, VA   
• Crayola Corporation, Easton, PA   
• Markel Corporation, Henderson, NV    Rudolph E. Lee Gallery, Clemson Univ, Clemson, SC   
• Vista LifeSciences, Inc., Englewood, CO
• Anthony Elms, Chief Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia and Co-Curator of 2014 Whitney Biennial