Photo Credit: Marion Voysey

Appreciating Betty White's work is both a rewarding journey and an extraordinary destination.

Her masterful pencil discovers faces with minimalist economy while imbuing them with a Renaissance quality. Her materials, the handmade paper, the pigments, the occasional collage elements such as bark, resonate as elements of nature from which true art has always been formed. White's subjects, faces, trees and branches, spaces filled with glowing light, and more faces, regard us gravely. They seem to know what we often forget, the unity or mysterious conjunction of space and time, and our innate connection to it.

Through her works, we rediscover the continuity of generations linking the distant past with an inevitable future, ancestors and descendants reflected simultaneously. More than this, the human essence we encounter unveils the elemental bond between the earth and sky, between the corporeal and the spiritual. The human is not so frail after all. In the faces we study, absorbing their personalities, we begin to see what makes each of us both unique and connected. White's work unveils the soul.

Both consciously and by their relationship to the earth and sky, these faces express far more than the immediately poignant joy and sadness, the powerful echoes of personal history and surviving hope for the future. They weave us each into the intricate fabric of humanity in all its range and nuance of experience. Their essence connects us to the transcendent core of our very nature, aligning birth, life, death, and re-birth into an eternal continuum. Our human spirit lives here, in all its complexity and simplicity. White delivers both our essence and its conjugation of timelessness with subtle artistry, and ultimately, with love.

This is work to live with, to engage and develop a long term relationship with. It grants insight, and recognition of human nature in intimate and spectacular scope.

-Vera Ignatowitsch, 2017