Volusia County Courthouse - Troy White

Flights of Passage, 2001
Acrylic

Troy White
DeLand, Fla.
Click on the image to see a larger view

Troy White enjoys all types of painting – on canvas, on the side of a house, or spray painting a car. A few of his heroes include Lichenstien, Rauchenberg, Dine, Kienhohtz, Bouyes and Duchamp. He has spent many weekends at the DeLand airfield. The airplanes delighted his senses, and the sky was an immense ever-changing canvas. Since he was a kid, White’s real heroes were the knights of the air, pilots who strapped themselves into high performance aircraft and jousted in the thin air above the clouds. These talented artists of a different type captured his imagination, and he read all the books he could find about them. From the 1970s doodles in the margins of his class notes, to his first one-man show in 1978 through today, aviation of one sort or another has remained the predominant imagery in his work. Through his art he hopes to convey his passion for the sky, airplanes, and the pilots who wrote their history in that vast arena, and perhaps even to instill some of that passion in those who are viewing his paintings.

“Pilots and air crew return to NAS DeLand flying Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers after a late spring training mission in 1944. NAS DeLand was a major training base for pilots and aircrew in dive bombers during WWII. This painting is special to me because I work, skydive and learned to fly at the DeLand airport. My grandmother was a sheet metal worker at the Douglas aircraft factory in El Segundo, California during WWII, building the SBD dive bombers depicted here.” 
– Troy White