Max White ROI
Contemporary painter exploring atmosphere, structure and memory through expressive oil landscapes.
Max White’s paintings are rooted in a lifelong fascination with urban and natural landscapes. From early encounters with the work of Canaletto and L. S. Lowry, he developed a sensitivity to the way atmosphere, architecture and human presence combine to form scenes that feel both chaotic and harmonious.
Originally devoted to drawing, White’s practice shifted dramatically during his teenage years when he began experimenting with analogue photography, building a pinhole camera and working intensively in the darkroom. The smoky textures and atmospheric ambiguity of those early images shaped his painterly language, leading him towards oil paint as a medium capable of holding both structure and emotion.
Influenced by artists such as Jeremy Mann, Ken Howard and Andrew Gifford, White pursued painting with increasing focus while completing a degree in Architecture, graduating in 2019. Architectural training sharpened his understanding of geometry, composition and critique, fundamentally informing the spatial awareness and structural clarity within his work.
Working both en plein air and in the studio, White gathers colour notes and oil sketches from direct observation before developing larger works through layered paint and considered composition. His paintings balance immediacy and deliberation, celebrating the physicality of oil while striving to preserve the emotional charge of the original moment.
White has exhibited extensively at the Mall Galleries with the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Society of Marine Artists and the New English Art Club. His accolades include First Prize in the Winsor and Newton Young Artist Award at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 2023, The Green and Stone Prize at the Chelsea Arts Society, and The New Generation Award at the Royal Society of Marine Artists.
He is a Full Member of the The Wapping Group of Artists, the Chelsea Arts Society and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters.
Available Work
Painting for me is about holding onto moments where I experienced something profound. That feeling most often arises from the landscape, though I find subjects everywhere, from the West End of London to the quiet familiarity of my own kitchen.
I believe in celebrating the materiality of oil paint. Texture becomes a language within the work, describing structure, light and movement where it feels necessary. This physical abstraction is paradoxically what allows me to approach the realism I am searching for.
Each composition begins on paper, where I study geometry, tonal relationships and colour harmony before reshaping them to fit my personal vision. The discipline of compositional study, combined with a layered and textural application of paint, means much of the work resolves in the studio. Yet all colour and value information is gathered from life through direct observation, in the form of notes and small oil studies.
A painting may take weeks or months to complete. Over that time I wrestle with the surface, attempting to translate and preserve the emotion I felt when I first encountered the subject. Ultimately, my work seeks authenticity in the expression of nature, offering something that resonates beyond the specific place depicted, a shared nostalgia that viewers can inhabit as their own.
Interested in available works or commissions?
oil on board
41 x 21cm
(framed approx. 55 x 35cm)
by Max White ROI