Susan Dorothea White

Susan Dorothea White (born 10 August 1941), also called Sue White and Susan White, is an Australian painter, sculptor, and printmaker. She is a narrative artist and her work concerns the natural world and human situation, increasingly incorporating satire and irony to convey her concern for human rights and equality. Her art is skill-based and multidisciplinary; she is the author of Draw Like Da Vinci (2006).

Born in Adelaide, South Australia, White grew up in the outback mining town of Broken Hill; her family supported and encouraged her artistic development. She started boarding school in Adelaide in 1954, returning home to Broken Hill during school vacations to paint and draw. White first exhibited in 1957; in 1958, while still at school, she began accepting commissions and attended Saturday drawing classes conducted by the artist James Cant in Adelaide. From 1959 to mid-1960, White was a prize-winning student in the Diploma of Fine Art program at the oldest public art school in Australia, the South Australian School of Art (SASA; see University of South Australia). At SASA White was initiated in art appreciation by Dora Chapman who taught her "a broad range of skills including perspective projection". White also learnt lithography from Udo Sellbach. The Adelaide art critic Elizabeth Young described White’s work in the 1959 landmark exhibition Painters and Sculptors of Promise, organised by the Royal South Australian Society of Arts and opened by Don Dunstan, as "an able landscape impression".

Known at this time as a landscape and portrait painter, White was a regular prize-winner in the annual Broken Hill exhibitions from 1959 to 1962. With other prize-winning artists such as Florence May Harding, Pro Hart, and Sam Byrne, White was a foundation member of the Willyama Arts Society and participated in its Broken Hill and Adelaide exhibitions in 1961 and 1962. Her portrait of Mr. H.L.C. Cotton, father of the Australian senator Bob Cotton, was described as "strongly painted...outstanding".

In July 1960 White moved to Sydney to continue full-time studies at the Julian Ashton Art School under its principal teacher Henry Gibbons. She also attended evening classes at the National Art School, in sculpture under Lyndon Dadswell and in drawing. White held her first solo exhibition in 1962 at age 20 at the Technical College in Broken Hill; this exhibition comprised 60 works and included oil and watercolour paintings, drawings, lithographs, and etchings. Praising the quality of her work, Harding wrote: "Bowing to no popular ism or formula except hard work, practice and observation, Susan White turned to our countryside with the fresh vision and vigor of youth. In her pictures it is all there – the red clay, erosion, bramble wattles bursting in bloom, the 'little creeks', big gums, struggling roots, wispy foliage, dry white grass, the silver sheen of the saltbush, dark rocky outcrops... Miss White's exhibition...is a must for all Broken Hill art lovers". In 1963 the Sydney critic Daniel Thomas described her landscape painting as "good in its curious Victorian way".

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