Today we’d like to introduce you to Carly Veronica White.

Hi Carly Veronica, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I grew up in Sonora, CA a small town in the Sierra Nevada Foothills of Northern California. I moved to Los Angeles when I was 18 to pursue Animation. I graduated from CalArts in 2009 with a degree in Character Animation, one year of my degree was spent attending École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France. I worked directing and producing animation for eight years between LA and Austin and ultimately felt creatively unfilled. Animation is a beautiful medium but it requires a lot of computer work and I felt I lost my artistic self. In 2018, I traveled to India for five months on a spiritual quest to reconnect with what I felt I had lost. I have always had a deep love for street art and have always created large drawings in pastel, for some reason it didn’t occur to me until I traveled to India that it could be me creating the street art I loved so much.

I wanted to use my creativity to give back to the communities I visited and mural art checked all the boxes I was looking to fill. While creating works on the street, I can connect with communities, create large scale works, be outside and be physically active with my work. I have always had extreme wanderlust, street art it is the perfect art form to express while backpacking. While in India, I painted five murals. The following year I traveled to Japan and painted two there. I currently live at The Brewery Artist Lofts in Downtown Los Angeles. For the last year, I have been turning my loft into an immersive mural experience and creating murals in the Southern California area.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
My journey has been far from smooth. Growing up, I always thought I wanted to work in animation because I love to draw so much. There is so much push back in society with the concept of the “starving artist”. With animation, it seemed I could express myself artistically and get paid for my work. I attended CalArts because it is the best school in the country for animation and is famous for turning out creative geniuses. While in school, I dove deep into my work, created my own films and was able to express myself artistically on an incredible level. Unfortunately, I didn’t think much about what my career would be after school. When I graduated, I emerged from the art school bubble and faced the reality of the animation industry. I never saw myself as a showrunner or directing feature-length animation. My work is experimental and I wasn’t interested in creating animation for children. That left opportunities in documentaries, advertisements and explainer videos. I began to feel I really didn’t resonate with directing character animation started getting heavily into graphic design and ultimately married the two creating motion graphics.

My work had become heavily computer-based and I felt totally exhausted, burnt out and so far away from my true love for creating art. Near the end of my career in animation, I began experimenting with ways that I could create art that could be shown in galleries. I was living in Austin, Texas and I got really into laser cutting and created a series of large artworks with laser cut wood that I painted and layered with epoxy resin in frames that I built. I made a big life decision to move back to Los Angeles with my partner at the time. In the process, I lost my studio and access to a laser cutter. Feeling lost in my direction and emotionally devastated, I decided to take a leap of faith and travel to India for five months to realign myself spiritually and find my sacred calling. While on the plane traveling to India, I had the idea to seek out walls to paint. Since I would be backpacking, I wouldn’t have a studio and I wanted to explore the gallery without walls. When I painted my first wall in Coorg, India I knew I had found my direction.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My work is an expression of how I see existence – a continual process of fracturing, reformation, and rebirth. Similar to how the serpent sheds its worn-out skin, the remnants of my past works become the soil that nourishes and supports new creations. By letting my art naturally evolve, I hope to portray the beauty that is all around us and deepen people’s appreciation of the divine self and its connection with the universe.

Recently I’ve been developing a new process to ensure that every step of artistic creation brings me joy. Since my background is in commercial art, I often get too caught up in the end result of each project rather than ensuring a joyful process. But the journey is just as important as the destination. I realized that elements of my process were taxing on my body and mind, and I was held back by that. I feel certain that smoothing out my process will lead to new artistic breakthroughs, and I’m so excited to share new work in the coming weeks!

What’s next?
In the last year, I have discovered my deep love for spray paint. Spray paint allows me to paint rough surfaces with ease. I just finished my first fully spray-painted mural. I am ecstatic to explore how I can create immersive mural experiences on the street.

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