Sarasota Arts & Culture Magazine - September/October 2007 - (Page 19)

: : Interview fun these characters can have living together in a house and meeting these competitions.” White visualizes up to 10 stacked panels for production, instead of the Sunday morning strip of one left-to-right. The actual printing specificities are the question. “When you’re a creator, you don’t really think about that so much as the creation itself,” he explains. White, of all people, would be acutely aware of that fact. Ever since he was a child, he knew artistry was his future. “I was born with the vision in my head to see and recreate,” he says. “I grew up in the ‘60s watching Star Trek and westerns. I opened up my mind to a lot of fantasy early on.” White discovered illustration in his adolescent years. “I taught myself to draw animals from the encyclopedia. My dad bought an illustrated Bible with reproductions of the old masters’ paintings. To a kid, The Bible looked like fantasy, with people coming out of the clouds, devils and demons, and horses crossing the sea. I was hungry for that kind of dramatic imagery. Who can resist the beauty of an old Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Leonardo?” Enamored with the art form, White began making his own comics at age 11. At age 14, White began his first freelance jobs—a mural of the Jordan River at a church that led to the newspaper commissioning him to do courtroom sketches for a trial. Right before venturing down to Ringling, White did pastel portraits at an amusement park in Carowinds. “That trained me to draw people quickly and work in crowds,” he says. “Caricatures are like the fast food of the art industry, but they’re meant to be quick and digestible.” White has never stopped engulfing himself in artistic endeavors. He teaches cartooning at the Art & Frame Shop every Saturday, adult art classes at Ringling, workshops in the Blue Ridge Mountains every fall, library programs for cartooning around Florida, and gives lectures and demos at art organizations. Besides teaching, White has built a reputation for multitudinous kinds of freelance work, like the illustrated map for the Ringling Museum received at the visitor center, full color paintings of the opera stars for the Sarasota Opera House, pencil drawings for album covers and CDs, and currently, brochure art for Planned Parenthood. “There’s nothing I don’t think I can do. In my mind, I’m invincible,” he says. For contact info and to view more of Michael White’s work, visit www.michaelwhiteart.biz. From Top: Scene from Michael’s Sorrysota Comic Strip; Captain Earl; From Michael’s S-People, Book of Sarasota Characters. arts and culture magazine : : 19 http://www.michaelwhiteart.biz

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Sarasota Arts & Culture Magazine - September/October 2007

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