In this memoir Catherine White examines the aesthetic influences of her sculptor father, Willard David White Jr., and her printmaker mother, Marjorie Powers White. In thirty-four lushly illustrated vignettes she has selected manifestations of their passions to incite focused remembrances of an art- and family-focused life.
After our parents are gone, I wonder how do we remember them? One way is by association. My parents imparted to me a love of water. Thus, there is opportunity for remembrance at each immersion—everything from the bathtub, to hiking by a local stream or river, or most powerfully a swim in the ocean. I can sit in my chair where I am able to glimpse our pond as well as my dad's sculptures. It is easy to miss his hand and his jokes. But I don't miss his smoking or his grumpiness. There are, of course, occasional, even desirable waves of sadness. The reality of death is a mirror image to the reality of birth. At birth we are imagining the essence of one who is not yet made, an incipient soul. After a parent's death, their soul lingers. A relationship means love and perhaps irritation, trust as well as doubt. We hope to count on those who are living until the reality that they are no longer here. But their soul remains in the river of our memory, forever bobbing in the day's current.
An excerpt about Willard from Drawing Wobbles:
He treated himself to the same kind of wobble and view of imperfection when he drew his self-portraits. The paper caught his bald head with the wrinkled brow and the ears that stuck out. With a tender hand, an eye for reality, and a love of life, his drawings of himself and his family capture a devotion to both artistic voice and expression alongside the art of raising a family in all of its beauty and tensions.
An excerpt about Marjorie from A Stream of Shapes:
As a shape maker, print maker, and poet she consistently worked on the fringes of her life. Her journal was always on the kitchen table or in her purse. When we kids were little, she carried a sketchbook to the playground and made drawings of the children in the sandbox, on the slide, or in the swing. She found poetry in our movement. She created with her vulnerabilities as a woman-mother-wife. But as she worked, she also felt that it was totally possible to coexist as an artist-mother-wife-daughter. Yet, it was never simple to find balance.
Catherine White is a ceramic artist who grew up in an art engrossed household in Manhattan. Catherine has lived and worked since 1988 amidst the rolling hills of Warrenton, Virginia, one-hour west of downtown Washington, DC. She has had commissions for state gifts given by President Obama and Michelle Obama. She is represented in both the Renwick and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian. White taught at Washington, DC's Corcoran College of Art + Design for many years. For more than forty years she has had commissions from OMEN-AZEN, a Japanese restaurant in New York City and Kyoto, Japan. She has exhibited widely, most often in Washington, DC and Manhattan as well as Chicago, Richmond, and Baltimore. White studied painting in Aix-en-Provence and has an MFA from Antioch University. [Find her as artistpotter on instagram.]
