(gentle cheerful music) - I would say that one of my gifts in this world is being able to pick up on something artistic very easily, and my greatest weakness is boredom and moving on to the next thing very quickly.

So I've got a little bit under my belt of what I'm capable of.

When I start a piece, it is always a little bit daunting.

I can really drag my feet and say, "Oh, I don't wanna do this.

It's so much work.

It's gonna take hours."

And then those hours are gone in what feels like minutes.

I'll come back afterwards and say to my husband, "Did I just forget that I love painting?"

(gentle cheerful music) I have been an artist my entire life.

Feels like I came out painting and drawing and just doing something.

And my mom, who is actually a really prolific stained glass artist, she always pushed my artistic ability.

She always encouraged me to go farther with it, to take classes, and to just constantly be creating.

My mom had our home absolutely stocked with anything I might want to explore.

And so my whole life I have been painting.

(gentle cheerful music) The majority of my work is acrylic painting.

What I aim to do is to continue to push it and actually make it something that when you look at that, you say, "That is something Bailey White did."

Every single painting starts with the background.

I really, really love a baby sky blue.

The majority of my paintings have that as just a solid one color background.

Then I come in, I draw out the buildings, and then it's just color blocking for me.

I really, really like to explore buildings around the Fargo-Moorhead area.

I like to paint our architecture and especially brick buildings, and I love to share that with other people, especially people who have connections to those buildings.

It can be so easy to be lost in a building.

When you're looking at architecture, you go, "I don't know what's next.

Everything's run together."

Especially when you're painting it, all of the lines, you lose them.

So it's just really important to color block and then just start blending, and before I know, the painting is done.

Every time I make a painting, I set out to do realism, but it always just ends up getting pulled back into illustration because I like to have my bold and thick lines.

I like to use paint pens, and so it always just ends up somewhere between realism and illustration.

It's interesting because I don't want to fall into abstract or even like slightly abstract, but I also want that to be such a recognizable part of my work.

It's just constantly pushing in different directions and just trying not to get stagnant in whatever I'm doing.

I've been calling it just like a patchwork style.

Drawing from the farmland, I want people to see all of that together.

I hope that people see the sense of community that I'm trying to pull in.

I like to take the places around me and just show the beauty that's here, what the people here have made, and then I just get to replicate that a little bit.

(gentle cheerful music) When it comes to the architecture stuff, I know what that's gonna look like 'cause I know exactly what it needs to look like to be recognizable.

But when I do some more creative stuff and I'm trying to expand my artwork, I try to not be so rigid about how I'm thinking.

I try to really let what wants to be be.

If I want it to be this and it's just not working, I say, "It's just not what the canvas wants to be and I have to let it go this direction."

I've been honored with some different things, like being the Giving Hearts Day 2023 Artist of the Year.

I've also gotten to work with Medora on a few different projects that just celebrates their region.

The one I did for the 2023 Giving Hearts Day Artist of the Year was called "Floodplains," and that was abstract.

It still was just imagery in a different form of our area.

(gentle cheerful music) I love the Midwest.

I love North Dakota.

I love Minnesota.

I love where I am from.

I have a hard time looking at a mountain scape and wanting to paint it, and I think a lot of that comes from painting and creating what you know.

I've stared at wheat fields.

I see it every single day.

I know what she looks like.

I know what it's supposed to feel like when you see that painting.

I want to create things that the people around me will appreciate.

If we lived in a world where arts weren't supported by the communities around you, you would live in such a gray and stagnant world to think about the pieces that we would lose if that wasn't part of our lives.

My biggest goal is to just start getting to be in shows, but I need to build my collection first.

And so just focusing on building up an actual portfolio of either the architecture of the patchwork designs that I wanna do, just solid portfolios and pieces that all fit together.

(gentle cheerful music) Maybe some other people, if they were to tell their parents that they are going to go to art school, their parents might say that is a waste of money.

And though right now I'm not saying that it was the smartest decision I ever made, my mom knew that that's what I was gonna do.

She never questioned it.

She supported it the whole way.

And when I called her to tell her that this was happening for me, all she said was, "I'm so proud of you."

(gentle cheerful music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.