The John Natsoulas Gallery is thrilled to be hosting the solo exhibition of Deirdre White’s paintings from September 30 to October 24, on the first floor of the gallery. Please join us for the reception, featuring free refreshments and live music, on October 9 from 7-9pm!
Deirdre White received a BFA at Tyler School of Art and an MFA from UC Davis. She has exhibited nationally and throughout California, including at Bane Gallery, Ampersand International Arts and Analog Gallery (San Francisco), John Natsoulas Gallery (Davis), The Triton Museum of Art (Santa Clara), Track 16 (Los Angeles), and MadKat (Rancho Mirage, California). Her work has been featured on the album covers of John Dwyer (of OSees), The Sandwitches, Sarah Beth Nelson and Tom Heyman, and was a recipient of the Jon Imber Painting Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center.
Born in San Francisco and raised in Berkeley, California and suburban Philadelphia, Deirdre is a Continuing Lecturer in painting and drawing at UC Davis and an adjunct at City College of San Francisco in Studio Art. She lives and maintains a studio in San Francisco in the Mission on the edge of Potrero Hill.
Deirdre White, We Skipped the Light Fandango, 2025, oil on canvas
Artist Statement
My work focuses on the confluences of events, memories, and personal narrative about living in the American west. Inspired by Baroque and northern European painters, as well as movies and the children’s book illustrations of my childhood, I construct visual stories that have a poetic spark for me. Drawing from found imagery, imagination, and documentation of my own environment around San Francisco, I paint worlds that are out of balance, imagined as places where grief is experienced collectively, and where hope and wonder survive amidst chaos, loss, and societal collapse.
As I work on my paintings, often I will reference previous works by carrying a through line of elements, motifs, or a continuum of imagery from previous paintings like characters in a book. My process has an ongoing conversation with the paintings of history, as well as the paintings of my contemporaries, and even with the paintings that I hope to make in the future. In this sense I’ve come to see the practice of painting itself as a kind of social and historical dialogue, even as the activity is quite solitary and even if the conversation I am having in my studio is sometimes with ghosts.
-Deirdre White 2026