WANDA WHITE KEEPS FINDING THE STORY

by Art Monroe

Wanda White has always known how to make art in whatever space life gives her. As a child, that space was modest, to say the least. “I started drawing behind a chair when I was 4,” she says. Wanda, the studio, and the artistic instinct eventually grew, of course.

For nearly 77 years, Wanda has followed that instinct through classrooms, hospitals, murals, cameras, watercolors, digital art, and the occasional wrestling match with technology. Her creative life has never been a straight line, but it has been a steady one.

Born in Terrell, Texas, Wanda attended school in Rockwall and later graduated from East Texas State University, now Texas A&M University-Commerce. She studied art and education, then taught 3rd-8th grade art in Queen City.

From there, things took a more technical turn. Wanda moved to Amarillo, where she worked for three years as a medical illustrator for the Northwest Texas School of Nursing, and doing some work for the Amarillo Hospital District. It was art in service of clarity, education, and care.

Then came marriage, children, moves, and the busy years that can make creative work harder to reach. Wanda still painted when she could. “Every once in a while, a year or so would pass without me doing some artwork,” she says, “but I tried to keep my hand in it.”

One of her most memorable projects came in Amarillo, when she volunteered for a downtown revitalization project. Rather than contribute a single picture, Wanda asked if she could paint a mural. The piece imagined what a storefront might have looked like in the early 1940s, with fashion illustrations, mannequins, a ‘39 roadster, and one especially personal detail.

“I slipped in a picture of my mom,” she says. “Because I was missing her.”

The mural drew attention, earned Wanda a letter of commendation from the Amarillo Chamber of Commerce, and appeared in part on the front page of the local newspaper in 1989. “That was the heyday for me,” she says.

But Wanda has never been one to leave creativity locked in one particular heyday.

After moving to Richardson in 2019 to be closer to her son and his family, she began taking classes at Richland College. Then COVID interrupted things…

“It was hard to do watercolor illustrations over Zoom,” she notes.

So, she pivoted. She bought a new camera and took a beginner photography course to learn how to use it. Her first assignment impressed her instructor, and he asked to enter it in a student art show. “It was a black and white, and there weren’t that many entries,” she says. “But I won.”

Photography became part of Wanda’s larger artistic process, using photos as the basis for new paintings. For a single painting, she may take over 100 photographs. They’re not just records. They’re raw material. Wanda is drawn to images that suggest something beneath the surface. “I like to choose pictures with stories,” she says.

That instinct led her to paint her famous cousins, the legendary Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Wanda recalls spending Christmases with them and even remembers shooting fireworks with Stevie Ray when he was about 14. Years later, she chose a black-and-white photograph of the brothers playing a double-neck guitar and transformed it into color, using several reference photos to help solve the shadows and details, capturing their “playful side” and their closeness.

Travel has also become a rich source of material. After a trip to Ireland, Wanda painted Blarney Castle and tucked herself into the lower corner of the image, joking that the little figure looked somewhat like a leprechaun. At her son’s cabin in New Mexico, she photographed wild turkeys and a deer that stayed with her long after the moment passed. The deer eventually appeared in two paintings. “Because we connected,” she says. “We bonded.”

That is Wanda’s gift: she notices when something is asking to become art. A storefront. A cat. A castle. A deer in the trees. A family photograph. A memory. A place she visited once and carried home through the camera.

“I try to keep my mind active,” she says. And she does. But more than that, Wanda White keeps her eyes, hands, and curiosity active. All these years after that first studio behind a chair, she is still finding the story. Then, patiently, she’s giving it shape.