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Born in 1955 in Morristown, NJ, United States 1979, B.A., Yale University, New Haven, CT |
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"Why I began painting is really the mystery. My mother and brother were artists, and I grew up with plenty of art supplies at my disposal. But I didn’t think I had a whole hulluva lot of native drawing ability, so I wasn’t inclined to try painting. On the other hand, I was always clever with tools and raw materials, such as plaster and wood, which were always just putty in my hands. It occurred to me that I could probably, easily be a sculptor, and yet that seemed too much like the building profession [my former vocation], with all the tools and technical problems I’d just left behind. Painting, by contrast, seemed more akin to alchemy. That’s what appealed to me initially, the idea of making something from nothing, or practically nothing.
It’s difficult to say where, exactly, my paintings fall in the spectrum of styles. The common thread might be described this way: nothing is ever purely abstract or slavishly literal. I work ‘on the spur of the moment,’ improvising and changing entire paintings when things aren’t going well, and try as much as possible, to let the paint do my work. Sometimes the results are exquisitely mimetic, as in a piece I painted called Penmanship Matters, a looping string painting which was squired from a bottle. At other times, I work in quite the opposite way, using the paint to soften hard lines and calling attention to the fact that even the most carefully rendered face or object is, after all, just paint."
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 Selection of works from William Mathews |
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