Born in Adelaide, South Australia on 10 August 1941,[1] White grew up in the outback mining town of Broken Hill.
At SASA, White was initiated in art appreciation by Dora Chapman who taught her "a broad range of skills including perspective projection".
[5] With other artists such as Florence May Harding, Pro Hart, and Sam Byrne (painter), White was a foundation member of the Willyama Art Society and participated in its Broken Hill and Adelaide exhibitions in 1961 and 1962.
[5] In July 1960, White moved to Sydney to continue full-time studies at the Julian Ashton Art School under its principal teacher Henry Gibbons.
In her pictures it is all there – the red clay, erosion, bramble wattles bursting in bloom, the 'little creeks', big gums, struggling roots, wispy foliage, dry white grass, the silver sheen of the saltbush, dark rocky outcrops... Miss White's exhibition...is a must for all Broken Hill art lovers".
The basis of the method is the application of successive washes of acrylic colour to the wood with light sanding of the surface between each wash."[9] The New York critic Andrew Margolis described White's more recent paintings as exploring "the most intimate experiences of her life, as well as more topical subjects, in meticulously limned acrylic paintings on wood panels.
Her ability to examine unflinchingly such personal milestones as her surgery for a benign brain tumor with a dazed self-portrait in a vertiginously askew hospital setting results in some of the most emotionally jarring narrative imagery in recent art".
[11] Subsequently, The First Supper was exhibited in a solo show in Cologne, in the Munich Volkshochschule and in other centres in Germany with media commenting "...in this portrayal Jesus is a woman, an Australian aboriginal.
[10] Following her solo show in New York in 1998, the Hechinger Collection acquired White's mixed media assemblage It Cuts Both Ways, which was then displayed in a long-term exhibition at the National Building Museum.
[3][9] The media she uses for drawing include pen and ink, ballpoint, brush, crayon, chalk, pastel, conté, and charcoal.
With over 150 images, the book explains seven fundamental drawing principles used by Leonardo da Vinci, as well as his tools and techniques such as silverpoint.
She analyses Leonardo's artworks including The Last Supper, Ginevra de' Benci, The Virgin of the Rocks and reveals the skills behind them.
[24] In 2007, the book was translated into French and published as Dessiner à la manière de Léonard da Vinci.