[1] Born Richard Elis Blair White, on the island of Jamaica in 1951, to a family of prominent businessmen and founders of the town Oracabessa.

"Von" is the stage name of Richard White, an artist who specialises in pastel tropical scenes inspired by nature and the female form.

Graduating with honours from Goldsmiths, Von went on to develop his own style of abstraction, with a keystone on the masters that have gone before – particularly Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin and Georgia O'Keeffe.

He expanded on many of his early ideas on art in an academic thesis based on creativity and its relationship with Taoism of Laozi.

Von Grew up in Oracabessa, and attended Oracbessa Primary as a youth, and then at eight years old went to dèCarteret College [5] in Mandeville where he completed his secondary education with a primary focus on the visual arts, finishing with A level Art and A level English Literature.

He then applied to Goldsmiths College London where he was accepted to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and again under Professor Harry Thubron tutelage he graduated First Division honours in 1977.

His work is owned by people worldwide, with original paintings in locations from Australia to the far east, and from Europe to North America.

Von is an artist who is a Jamaican that studied art in London England and found inspiration from the Sage Laozi from ancient China.

Laozi, a possibly mythological figure reputed to have lived around the time of Confucius, is said to have been keeper of the imperial archives at Luoyang in the province of Henan in the 6th century B.C.

[6] All his life Laozi taught that "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao"; but, according to ancient legend, as he was riding off into the desert to die - sick at heart at the ways of men - he was persuaded by a gatekeeper in northwestern China to write down his teaching for posterity.

The essence of Taoism is contained in the eighty-one chapters of the book- roughly 5,000 words- which have for 2,500 years provided one of the major underlying influences in Chinese thought and culture, emerging also in proverbs and folklore.

Alfred North Whitehead expressed his central concept thus: "In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed 'creativity' and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident.".

The numbers as used here are simply intended to suggest the need for an intuitive awareness of the process of differentiation from nondifferentiation, the realization that the multiple diversities of existence emanate from the unity of the absolute realm of Tao.

It is, rather, a mere intuitive reflection of things [10] Von the artist and student of the Tao in his academic thesis explored a subtle comparison of Taoist views and picture making.

[13] It was said that when Paul Gauguin first went to Tahiti he was amazed at the colours he was painting with, so much brighter due to the strong tropical light as opposed to France where he was formerly.

[15] Georgia O'Keeffe shows an open spatial awareness, and positive link with nature and her surroundings.

To narrow this aspect of thought let us suggest that this material is our world complementary to outer space which it is within.

Through the study of our visible surroundings, Cezanne came to the conclusion that everything is based on the sphere, the cone and the cylinder.

The cube or the box is a man made form and Cezanne was the first to introduce a slanting of basically rectangular patches of colour in various directions achieving three dimensional solidity and depth.

They took this to its ultimate, including African sculpture as inspiration; but the cube or the box is a man-made form totally alien to natural construction unlike the sphere cone and cylinder.