San Francisco Examiner
SF Lives: Painting under pressure 
By Denise Sullivan
December 8, 2019



 








Now That My Ladder's Gone
January 31- February 28 2022
 

 




 
 
 





Ampersand International Arts

https://www.ampersandinternationalarts.com/heinserwhite

"Let’s begin with the painting, the materiality, the skin-like quality of oil paint itself living and breathing on a surface with more present and past than any other medium. Painting with oil is not for the squeamish or faint of heart, it’s physical, messy, dangerous and sleek as an otter in its capacity to elude and delight, to shimmer and then muddy up as if saying, “no not yet, go forward by starting over.” Great oil painters, of which Deirdre White is one, dance with their medium and thus expose their own viscera in the drag of a line or the mix of a color mostly seen by surgeons or first responders.

White’s subjects, the mobile contraptions built by un-homed people, gain historical grounding though her reference to the folds of cloth and bindings found in artworks by the old masters. Tarps, blankets and tents become togas, robes and table covers and the people, mostly unseen, transform into modern day penitents on an endless pilgrimage. Yet, there are no stations of the cross, streets or hostels along the way to give meaning or shelter to their quest.

White’s capacity to see the present through the past and thereby reveal a flattening in time between a person’s housed before and un-homed now insists we simultaneously consider multiple concepts:  Dignity, loss, ingenuity, despair, fate and favor, fucked and not yet fucked. That we look squarely at the brilliant colors and lush wrinkles of our uneven but collective collapse."
Tracy Wheeler, curator
January 2020
 



An Invitation to Mercy @ Bane Gallery 
Alison Allstrom, Curator

San Francisco is a port city, and has been a boom town many times over. But San Francisco functions best as a playground of art, music, poetry, and spectacle. Just ask the bay Area Figuratives, the Beats and the hippies, Survival Research Laboratories. These groups made San Francisco their art-fantasy playground. Everyone knew each other and they came out for each others' shows and art.
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But any movement, if enduring, produces its own outsiders. In the San Francisco of the1990's, while muralists and graffiti artists were kicking off the Mission School, Alison Alstrom, Rommel Romo and Deirdre White were smoking distorted figurative realism behind the gym. Rommel painted the iconic, oversized, oppressive chihuahuas that judged our excesses or steered colossally poor decisions while we did what we did in our favorite bar. Deirdre painted raw meat and honed her quiet subversive genius in academia, reaching a kind of pinnacle in reverse rebellion. While a fixture on the fringes, making drinks and selling books to up and coming art stars, Alison practiced painting in her bathrobe, in a tiny in-law apartment out where the 280 cuts across the southern tip of the city, rendering everything below it "excelsior."
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In 2024, Alison Alstrom has curated a group show with her new work in oils along with two other Mission District artists she's admired for decades. All three are visceral painters who appreciate a sensual and demanding medium that seems to have a life of its own. All three reveal everyday contradictions that alternately evoke despair or delight. Their work is dramatic and revelatory, asking you to look closely, and then look again, to find something surprising or familiar in a bird's ribcage, a freeway overpass, the gaze of a Mexican street dog.
-Clane Hayward, November 2024