Patricia Arquette brought some extra excitement for art lovers at last night’s Academy Awards.

She gave thanks “to my favorite painter in the world, Eric White, for the inspiration of living with a genius.”

White’s figurative paintings sometimes draw inspiration from popular cinema, with Down in Front: Love in the Afternoon showing actor Harry Dean Stanton smoking a cigarette, and others depicting fake film posters and drive-in movie theaters. His website names Copenhagen’s Gallery Poulsen as showing his work; artnet indicates that his work is available at Track 16 Gallery (Santa Monica) and Serge Sorokko Gallery (San Francisco).

Eric White, Jane, 2014, oil on canvas.

Greeting visitors to his website is Jane, 2014, a painting of a young woman, head thrown back, eyes closed and mouth open, as if in ecstasy; she’s improbably standing at a clothesline, wearing a purple floral dress that’s a bit Little House on the Prairie-meets-Urban Outfitters and standing in front of a 1970s-style van emblazoned with a painting of a wizard.

White’s site also has a section devoted to his “LP Paintings,” in which he lampoons record covers by bands ranging from Led Zeppelin to the Bad Brains, Stevie Wonder to the Adolescents.

Arquette won the Oscar for best supporting actress for her role in Richard Linklater’s masterful film Boyhood, in which she plays a single mother to two children. Ethan Hawke plays her ex-husband, with Ellar Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater as their son and daughter. The film was shot over 12 years, so that Linklater could show the actors actually aging rather than resorting to makeup or special effects. It was picked as one of New York Times critic A.O. Scott’s top 10 films of 2014. Scott called it “a tender, profound film” and “a model of cinematic realism.”

Arquette concluded her thanks with an impassioned call for feminist causes.

“To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights,” she said. “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”

To read about another woman who won big at the Oscars, see Edward Snowden Documentary Citizenfour by Art World Darling Laura Poitras Triumphs at the Oscars.