William Stoehr
My art is influenced by the ideas of the seminal Cubists and from concepts based on my developing understanding of the visual brain.
Each portrait starts with a single face, an ambiguous expression, shared gaze and uncertain context calculated to prompt you into completing the painting based on your own mental image and then to create the narrative.
If I create ambiguity along with a few naturalistic cues then maybe you create your own subjective reality. That is because you complete the image, you create the narrative and you project your own emotions. You will do a better job completing my painting with your own perfect mental image and personal narrative than I can.
I realize that I lose control of the painting the minute I quit work on it and it is seen, experienced and interpreted by others. So often viewers react in ways I never intended or foresaw.
I’m fascinated by how our brain perceives color, line, and value, as well as how distance influences the way we interpret images. For example, a face might appear realistic from afar, but up close, it transforms into a series of abstract shapes and patterns.
If I engage you with eyes, then I can also start to do other things peripherally with line and color. I suggest certain features and realistically detail others. I can color outside of the lines and your mind will resolve it. You arrange vague and scribbled outlines and graphic vectors to create a recognizable face.
I use a limited pallet of acrylic paint along with metallic and iridescent colors that produce changing patterns with changes in lighting and angle of view.
Working freely, I drip, brush, pour, scrub and scape paint while applying a variety of lines, dots and other adjustments.
The seminal Cubists believed that time, the fourth dimension, could be incorporated in their work so as to cause the viewer to process and perceive their cubist work as more real. They said they painted successive appearances in to a single image reconstituted in time. I see Cubism as a way of perceiving reality.
I often paint multi-views or facial features slightly out of alignment or out of focus. I frequently paint vaguely different expressions from one side of the face to the other. I combine three-dimensional and flat features.
These methods and variations might make these portraits appear more real as the illusion of time, half remembered memories, and prior experiences affect your perception.
I paint both with acrylic paint on canvas and digitally with my iPad. My digital work starts with a repurposed image of my own in-process or an early version of an acrylic on canvas.
I finish the painting on my iPad where I add various marks, graphic overlays and enhancements to the base image thus creating a new and completely different version.
I exhibit these digital-hybrid paintings as prints, on TV monitors or as projections as large as a theater screen.
My style is unmistakable and yet the qualities from one painting to the next appear different but somehow similar. I have parlayed problems and experiments into major elements of my style. I work in a free manner that results in a lot of unplanned effects that I observe, evaluate, and may attempt to replicate or morph into something else.
These experiments, accidents and exploitations drive what I do. It's the practice of making and creating in the moment as a response to something - a stimulus - an idea - a challenge - maybe a drip of paint. That drip running down my canvas may be random but what I do with it is not. What matters most is recognizing which accident or experiment might be useful and then how to exploit it and then I just go with it.
My paintings tend to be layers of fresh starts. I believe I have a finished face one day but soon I brush, draw, flow or spill paint all over the surface, leaving traces - a template to guide the next iteration. I suspect that my mental image and expectation of the painting keeps evolving as I work on it.
For me the essence of art is the exploration of fundamental issues of our time. I explore addiction, stigma, intolerance, and violence with its victims, witnesses and survivors. My job as an artist is to get you to think and to ask questions. This is the larger conversation; the wider dialog that I want to be part of. In the end we must ask how we are to respond. Simply being affected is not enough. How can I make that happen? Can I be part of the solution?
