My Betty White

Betty White is a visual artist, living and working in downtown Toronto.

Born in the US, Betty studied painting and, for a period, paper making, in a number of cities including Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Boulder (Colorado), Montreal and also Toronto.

Throughout her journey as an artist, Betty has drawn and painted using ink, pencil, pastels, and watercolours, creating art not only on canvas, but also on bark paper, animal skin, cotton, slate, and even pages and documents from old books. In addition to painting, she has taught art to teachers at the Boston Children’s Museum and at two schools in Toronto, where she inspired, and was inspired by, her young charges.

Since 1973, Betty has participated in group and solo shows in Europe (Paris and Les Mesnuls, France), Mexico (San Miguel de Allende), the USA (Martha’s Vineyard and Boston), and here in Canada (Montreal and Toronto). Her paintings can be found in collections held by Reader’s Digest, Triax Capital Management, the Toronto Metropolitan University, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Sales and Rentals Department of the AGO, and private individuals in North America, Europe, and New Zealand.

Art historian Rebekah Smick once described Betty’s work as powerful visual poetry, using the following words: (it is) ‘so completely intuitive and … confidently at peace with its own artistic project; (it shows a) ‘deeply physical appreciation of the organic world and its offering of possible media;’ (and expresses) ‘themes of intimacy and personal experience — the gathering of family, the satisfaction of significant friends, the mystery of faces, the claims of motherhood, the varieties of love, the profundities of loss.’

The photos above show Betty, the artist, as well as the visually enriching art-gallery-/-museum-like home in which she works and occasionally holds shows, which are open to the public.

To see more of Betty’s work, pls. visit https://bettywhite.ca

“The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.”

Glenn Gould