Category: Abstract Conceptual

#977

32″ x 28″ Acrylic on canvas. Have to see if this belongs. I feel like I’m not so much painting one piece at a time, as adding to a series. This happened with the poems I was writing. Not sure about this one yet.
#977

View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.

#976 Glyph

“Glyph”
24″ x 30″  Acrylic on canvas.
I’m finding that my fascination with patterns in broken pavement, walls of razed buildings, stucco and peeling paint, radiographs, high altitude photos of the earth, cartography, tree bark– has been converging in my recent paintings into a new direction. As though I’d been led–from the time I began assembling discarded fragments and trash on a table in the Ox–to my most recent paintings (say, from #958 and 959)–to the making of images, not raw abstractions, but drawn from life, one step beyond the horizon of understanding, of where we able to name what it is we are seeing.  This is why I’ve been labeling them, ‘conceptual,’ because they are about something… just that we can’t name what it is.
Many of my earlier pieces have a place in this line. Ones that don’t, and are less than satisfying to me, I’ve been painting over. The painting below is a paint-over of #612–a paining that was almost there… but not enough
#976.JPG
View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down

Beyond Appearance

#461 “Aterwords” 25″ x 32″ Acrylic on canvas. February, 2016
#461 afterwords

I’ve put letters and numbers in my paintings since I started painting. Sometimes prominent, sometimes almost hidden. I tend to think about these things after I do them. I had no ‘reason’ or explanation for them, but it occurs to me now that they are–more than symbolically, because they ARE symbols– emblems of what we use in our attempts to understand our universe beyond appearance: language and mathematics–fragments of our woefully incomplete understanding of ourselves, of the universe we have come to inhabit–ever so briefly.

A portrait is a powerful untruth
We are not what we look like

Nothing is