Eric White stars at opening, not girlfriend Patricia Arquette

Guests packed the gallery so tightly it might have been easy to confuse it for a Dreamforce event, minus the bright blue conventioneers’ lanyards.

Yes, she had given him a very public shout-out while accepting her Academy Award for best supporting actress (for “Boyhood”) earlier this year, but she wanted him, “the great love of my life,” to have top billing this night.

The painter, who has been collected by Leonardo DiCaprio and had his works shown across Europe, got his start making nachos at the Punch Line and selling goods at Flax art supply before landing jobs as an illustrator and caricaturist for the likes of Mondo 2000, a glossy counterculture magazine, and Colossal Pictures, among others.

In 1996, he mounted a solo show at Billy Shire’s La Luz de Jesus gallery in Los Angeles, and by 2000, had left for Brooklyn, N.Y. Actor David Arquette bought a piece in 2001, as did Patricia, which sparked a friendship with White that deepened in 2013, when the two began dating.

Unlike some art openings, where looky-loos from the street drop in for a sip of white in a plastic cup, the invite-only crowd contained trained eyes, like those of former Fine Arts Museums curator and author Robert Flynn Johnson, who lauded White’s “technical facility merged with amazing imagination.”

White says his style is fed by his love of 1940s Hollywood films, of cars (influenced by his childhood in the nation’s automaking center) and of psychology.

In another, the driver is White, who appears to be looking at his own eyes in the rearview mirror, but a closer look shows the eyes to be the driver’s, peering back at himself from a giant billboard in the distance.

“The thing about being an artist is, as jovial as we are at openings, most of our lives are spent behind closed doors — it’s almost a monastic existence,” Bergeron said.

[...] proud to watch the artist’s career arc come full circle were White’s brother, Justin, his father, Tom, his stepmother, Laurie, and his mother, Terri Tate, who, although she had worked as a psychiatric nurse and hypnotherapist, couldn’t quite fathom the meaning in the paintings.