Mr.StarCity

Sitting in this garden
Surrounded by the bloom
Waiting for my love
Hiding from the moon
Happy to smell the flowers
Admiring the petals
Smiling with the breeze
Whispering to me hello
Searching for a rose
Lost inside the meadow
— Mr.StarCity

To know David ‘Mr.StarCity’ White is to know his art. “There’s no difference,” he remarked. “My art is who I really am.” His life and art are not merely intertwined but one and the same. Indistinguishable. Whether he’s painting, filming, designing a suit or a pair of boots, writing lyrics, making jewelry, or envisioning the next pursuit for his poetic alter-ego, Loverboy, Mr.StarCity is always in the midst of ushering something new into existence. Seeing him dressed in his custom cornflower blue suit and matching suede boots, you’d be forgiven for wondering if he’s not just stepped out from the vibrant world envisioned by his paintings. 

 Merging his poetry, performance, and painting practices, “Garden of Love” features ten mixed-media portraits that correspond with lines from the second stanza in the Loverboy saga. Much like his creator, Loverboy is a man foremost devoted to the practice and performance of his art. He is a wandering saxophonist with a green thumb and a perennially broken heart. Each day, he falls in love, and each night, his beloved pleads with him to cease his errant ways. Though Loverboy can’t offer his heart, long since promised to his instrument, he leaves each woman with a piece of his love in the form of a lustrous blossom.

As Loverboy makes flowers unfurl from the earth, Mr.StarCity coaxes his vibrant portraits from soil, sand, pumice, charcoal, and acrylic. Their rough-hewn surfaces are lush yet acerbic, the gritty textures recall the sensation of having one’s hands in the ground. Loversboy's face, a polychromatic bouquet, emerges from the confines of a tightly cropped frame. Amorphous fields of color and texture connect and coalesce like pieces of a puzzle. Commanding as a full moon, there is no escaping the man’s wide-eyed gaze. The frankness of his expression is both intimate and unnerving. In each painting, a meticulously rendered flower appears where the mouth would be as if the bloom were meant to convey all that the man cannot say. 

Mr.StarCity plumbs the depth of the human condition for his color palette. The luminous lilac, cerulean, sage, and salmon swathes carry the work’s emotional freight. The cool currents of blue and purple tones, as in Hiding from the moon and Whispering to me hello, evoke melancholy, anguish, and despair. At the same time, the vibrant greens and occasional flashes of tangerine and citron, as with Happy to smell the flowers and Admiring the petals evince levity, joy, and vitality. They reverberate alternatingly with love’s passion, pleasure, and pain. They’re unabashedly vulnerable, tender. 

Through built-up layers of organic material mixed with acrylic, the artist animates a quasi-bas-relief dimensionality. Taken together, they affect an irreducible there-ness, a substantiality that engenders a similar command and presence to that of statuary. As the forms press past the picture plane unrestrained, they struggle against the parameters distinguishing art from reality. In this way, the immersive elements—patches of grass, roses, and benches—arranged throughout the space appear to have just escaped. 

Sitting amongst the flowers, simultaneously inhabiting the painted world of beauty, love, and creativity and the one beyond the frame, it begins to seem as if the two realms were not so different that if you only opened your eyes, looked around a little more attentively, you might just see how they’re one and the same. “This life it’s all so beautiful,” said Mr.StarCity. “I’m here to lead people toward absorbing and exploring this beauty intentionally. To see what I see.”   –Tara Anne Dalbow