About
Biography
Rebecca J. White is a United States–based painter whose pictures join ordinary places to a lattice of fine, circuit-like lines. The places run from Japanese shrine gates to the Florida Keys, the Joshua tree desert, Crete, and the U.S. Capitol, and on through Italy. Collectors meet the same hand in each of them: fields of color, drawn over with geometric lines.
After a Bachelor of Science at Nazareth College (1998) and a Japanese language concentration at Cornell University (2000), she moved to Kyoto. From 2004 to 2005 she trained in the MFA oil painting program at Tokyo University of the Arts (東京藝術大学院), studying under Professor Koji Kinutani. Years in Kyoto, later in Nagasaki (2019–2022), and time working in Gaeta and Naples still guide her subjects and palette. In 2016 she earned a master's in curriculum from Drexel University. Experience as an electronics technician informs the circuit-like structures in her paintings.
She works in several series, including Birth of a Torii (鳥居の生まれ), Cloud-maker, and Mercantile Mechanism. Solo exhibitions include the Kyushu Geibun Kan Museum (九州芸文館) in Fukuoka and The Athenaeum in Alexandria, Virginia. Juried group shows include VIVID at the d’Art Center. In 2025 the Visual Artists Association named her a Highly Commended Artist in its Artist of the Year Awards. In 2022 her painting Mercantile Mechanism #20 (Yanagawa) won the Grand Prize in the Western-style painting division of the 55th Sasebo Art Exhibition, Art Wave from the West (第55回佐世保美術展), in Nagasaki. She accepts commissions.
She also wrote and illustrated Spoken English for Artists, a textbook for art students learning English.
Awards
Artist statement
I paint because I want to look again at places we already think we know, wherever they are. I set fine lines across them, lines that behave like circuits: connections, memories, a structure you can trace. Those lines have followed the work from Japanese shrine gates to the Florida Keys, the Joshua tree desert, Crete, and the U.S. Capitol.
In Birth of a Torii (鳥居の生まれ), I set the familiar shrine gate into streets, shops, and landscapes that are not usually treated as sacred, and I ask what we choose to honor. Cloud-maker is my way of picturing how an idea takes shape: lines that behave like circuits, memories linking up, a sky that seems to be built as much as it is seen. Mercantile Mechanism turns to the systems, markets, and rituals that move goods and people — some observed, some imagined, and not only in one country.
My years in Japan, especially in Kyoto and Nagasaki, and my time in Italy, stay in the color and the architecture. So does my work as an electronics technician; those diagrams of connection still help me think about how a picture holds together. I paint in acrylic on canvas, laying down fields of color and then drawing over them with fine, geometric lines. I am grateful when a painting finds a home, and I welcome commissions for new work.
Commissions
Commissions are welcome. If you want a painting made for a particular place or subject, select below for a custom commission.