Poetry of White project

Poetry of White I

Poetry of White II

Poetry of White III

Poetry of White IV

Poetry of White V

Poetry of White VI

Poetry of White — Artist Statement

Dmitry King

White is not an absence. It is the fullest presence — the moment before language, before thought, before the noise of the world reasserts itself. In the Poetry of White series, I set out to paint that moment: the breath held between words, the silence that existentialist thinkers understood not as void, but as the very ground of being.

Each canvas in this series was built by hand, layer by layer, with oil and acrylic — two mediums that resist and respond to one another, much as spirit resists reduction to the merely material. My approach is intuitive and gestural: I do not plan the silence, I find it. The brush moves before the mind settles, tracing what cannot be articulated through language alone. White accumulates, recedes, breathes. It is never inert.

This series asks a question I believe painting is uniquely equipped to hold: What remains when everything superfluous is stripped away? The answer, I have come to understand, is luminous — not empty, but essential. The whiteness in these works is not a color so much as a condition: purity, stillness, and a spiritual silence that the viewer is invited to inhabit rather than merely observe.

Grounded in a classical European tradition yet moving toward something more internal and philosophical, Poetry of White represents a turning point in my practice — a commitment to restraint as its own form of power, and to the canvas as a space for genuine contemplation. These are not decorative works. They are invitations to stop, to look, and to listen to what painting has always known: that the most profound things live just at the edge of the visible.