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 evolve through an instinctive interest in the tension between a meticulous, almost photographic reality and a looser, more painterly style. They involve large scale interpretations of my own photographs, the subject matter graduating from portraiture to forest landscapes in recent years, unified by an implication of drama and a sense of a hazy, unknown narrative.

My most recent set of paintings is based on small, often-overlooked sections of woodland. Working in oils, and using techniques borrowed from my practice in portraiture, I translate photographs cropped from a wider scene. Depictions of forests are entrenched in the mystical, the stuff of fairytale, and can provoke a sense of tranquility, danger, nostalgia or anything in between, the interpretation reflecting past experience. The colours are altered, often stripping the scene of a sense of place or season, and as such the paintings remain distanced from any kind of conclusion, maintaining a sense of something slight, dreamt or misremembered.