William Stoehr
My work is rooted in the belief that painting is not simply a representation of the visible world, but of the mind’s experience of it.
Cubism opened a door that contemporary neuroscience has helped explain. Through observation and experimentation, the Cubists recognized that vision is not a simple recording of the world. It is shaped by memory, attention, emotion and change over time. They intuitively recognized that vision is actively constructed by the brain.
Today, neuroscience suggests that the brain continuously predicts and updates what it expects to see, integrating incoming sensory information with memory and prior experience.
Cézanne spoke of seeking la vérité en peinture—“the truth in painting.” For him, that truth did not lie in the optical illusion of linear perspective. Instead, he translated the three-dimensional world into interlocking planes of color and form, seeking to capture the experience of seeing as the eyes move through the world rather than from a single fixed viewpoint. His paintings suggest not a single frozen instant, but the accumulated experience of seeing over time. From this conceptual foundation, Cubism emerged.
The early Cubists pursued truth and a greater or essential reality. They spoke of the fourth dimension and of forms reconstituted in time, assembled from successive views rather than captured from a single fixed position. To me, the fourth dimension is time and it reflects the continuous merging of present perception with memory, made visible through change.
In their search for this true reality, the Cubists continually experimented. They abandoned linear perspective and conventional shadows to avoid fixing a scene to one moment. They compressed foreground and background into shallow geometric space, introduced collage as fragments of memory, reduced color to emphasize structure, and analyzed forms from multiple viewpoints before reassembling them into a unified image.
For me, Cubism is less a style than a way of understanding perception. Its enduring insight is that representing the passage of time brings painting closer to the way we actually experience reality.
These ideas shape the way I paint. I often combine multiple viewpoints within a single face. Slight misalignments, inconsistent lighting, out-of-focus elements, and subtly different expressions coexist within the same portrait.
I combine flat and dimensional space, sometimes bringing elements of the background forward while allowing other areas to retain depth, creating a visual sense of movement and the passage of time.
I keep shadows and highlights, but place them not where light would naturally fall in a single moment, but where they strengthen the composition while suggesting different moments in time.
I use a limited palette, often enhanced with metallic and iridescent colors that produce changing patterns with changes in lighting and angle of view.
In my own search for reality, ambiguity is central to my creative process. It invites viewers to slow down, question what they are seeing, complete the image with their own perfect mental image - the internally constructed representation the brain naturally supplies - and construct a narrative shaped by their own memories and state of mind.
Every portrait begins with a single face, an ambiguous expression, a direct, shared gaze, an uncertain context and a few naturalistic cues. Then there are the eyes.
If I engage you with the eyes, I can work more freely elsewhere. Some features are carefully rendered while others dissolve into gesture, marks or abstraction. Your brain assembles these fragments into a coherent face, supplying details I have intentionally left unresolved.
My portraits are not images to be decoded but collaborations between me and the viewer, mediated by the brain. In many ways, viewers complete the painting more convincingly than I ever could. They bring their own memories, experiences, emotions and personal narratives to the image, constructing a reality that is uniquely their own. My job is to provide the cues to make this happen.
I use these ideas not as an homage to Cubism, but in service of my own mission. My portraits explore substance use disorder, stigma and hope. I want my art to be not simply something to observe, but something to experience.
Each viewer leaves with a different painting because each viewer brings a different mind.
I paint both with acrylic paint on canvas and digitally with my iPad. My digital-hybrid paintings combine traditional painting, digital drawing and photographic manipulation.
Each digital-hybrid begins with a repurposed high-resolution image of one of my large-scale, unfinished acrylic-on-canvas works. I transfer the image to my iPad, where I continue to draw and build layers of marks and graphic elements. Using photographic tools, I dodge, burn, saturate, and resize the image, creating a new, original work entirely by my hand. These pieces are displayed on monitors, projected at theater scale, or printed on a variety of media including dye sublimation on aluminum.
Accidents and experiments are central to my process. A drip may be random; what I do with it is not. I work freely, observing and exploiting unexpected effects, turning problems into possibilities. Each painting becomes a series of fresh starts - a surface repeatedly disrupted and rebuilt. My expectation of the image evolves as the painting evolves.
Here are a few articles which further describe my methods.
