Jo White

Brightly coloured, brimming with humour, and attuned to the way familiar objects become lodged in the cultural memory, Jo White‘s paintings play on the irreverence and idiosyncrasies of the Australian vernacular.

Growing up on sheep and broadacre farms in Coonamble and Moree in north-west NSW, Jo was often found drawing in the dirt, constantly seeking out creative pursuits that would distract her from schoolwork. “I always wanted to be an artist; the idea of getting up and painting all day seemed like a dream to me,” Jo tells Samantha Van Egmond for Country Style magazine.

Jo’s postwar cottage in the heart of Armidale, in the NSW Northern Tablelands on the traditional land of the Anaiwan people, doubles as a “very tidy and organised” home studio. White, light-filled rooms provide a backdrop for Jo’s vibrant works, which are mostly acrylic on canvas. “As much as I love looking at other artists’ spaces, with their piles of art books and interesting layers and collections, I need to keep my space clean or I find it really distracting!” she says. Her latest exhibition comprises a series of aerial landscapes overlooking “unmistakably Australian” neighbourhoods, featuring fibro houses, Hills hoists, concrete kangaroos and a “mower and mortgage” vibe, with Jo drawing inspiration from Australian popular culture including music, films and TV shows.

The artist’s new additions to her fabulously offbeat body of work share certain sensibilities with Betoota’s comic stylings, evoking its sardonic spin on sozzled machismo, suburban torpor, and commonplace peccadillos. Where Betoota’s wry reporting on bad behaviour captures contemporary archetypes with biting specificity, Another Average Dictionary affectionately transforms ordinary objects into something similarly totemic – richly drawn, lightly nostalgic, and with a sting of recognition that lets us laugh at our own foibles.