Harriet White is a contemporary realist painter living and working in Bristol, UK. She studied at Falmouth Art College then Bath Spa University College, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art in 2001. Since then, she has exhibited regularly in the UK and the USA, has twice been selected for the BP Portrait Award and the Holburne Portrait Prize, has been a shortlisted artist in the Threadneedle Prize for Figurative Art, exhibited in the 2023 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and was the winner of the Tom Urwin Special Fine Art Award at the Society of Women Artists exhibition 2023.  

‘My paintings explore the relationship between reality and memory, transforming tangled forest spaces into intimate, dreamlike landscapes that balance a meticulous, photographic precision with a looser, painterly approach. The scenes I am drawn to are often anonymous and overlooked, unanchored to a specific place or time. Within this organic chaos, I strive to establish a quiet compositional order, reshaping the pieces into believable, painterly spaces.

Via the mechanics of photography, I push the composition away from literal reality by zeroing in on close-up spaces where details fluidly dissolve and reappear. I isolate scenes from their context and use tight cropping to abstract them into fragments, mirroring the fractured and fragile way we often remember the past. This departure from reality is developed further through shifts in colour. By altering palettes, I hope to evoke a sense of nostalgia or a sudden fondness for a place never visited, akin to remembering a scene from a film or trying to recall a dream. I enjoy the tension within this contradiction: our experience as viewers can be both deeply personal and wholly universal. Few people will have visited the specific place depicted, but the atmosphere remains instantly recognisable—evoking the universal, damp warmth of a forest after rain.’