William Stoehr
Art In the Time of COVID: Reinventing Myself
Our son and his wife had their hands full with two jobs, a second grader, online school and a newborn. We decided that we would much rather be with our family and help where we could. We packed up and moved to Washington DC. We now split our time between Boulder and DC. I decided not to set up a studio in DC.
Because of COVID-19, I had four shows postponed. The missed opportunities, cancellations and delays keep mounting up and, given my mission, at the worst possible time.
It was time to reinvent myself. I went digital on my iPad.
I can’t experiment with paint drips but I can still experiment with layers of color. I miss throwing paint and making large sweeping strokes with my large brushes but I also recognize that much of my painting is done with small brushes as I place tiny micro dots, lines and other marks across the surface of each canvas.
I love the scale of my seven-foot canvases but now I can project them billboard-sized. I love the way my paintings hang together on a gallery wall but now I can animate them and create a never ending, always changing virtual exhibition on social media and other online platforms. I love experimenting and learning new ways to handle paint but now I am learning and experimenting with iMovie, Photoshop and GarageBand.
But most of all I believe that reinventing myself is a way to take my art to a new level and to more effectively get my message out to those that matter most - victims, witnesses and survivors.
Several years ago I began to seriously draw on my iPad. I started with simple lines. I create lines from life. Can I capture essence with a line such that the line no longer looks like a person but has that person’s qualities?
David Hockney is a favorite of mine. I like the way he thinks. He is always looking for new ways to present his ideas. He is always pushing boundaries in a relatable way. I started to follow what he was doing with his iPhone and iPad paintings. I started to use the same drawing program he used. Then in 2012, I went to the David Hockney: A Bigger Picture exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. It was an expansive eye-opening visual celebration that showed me the potential for creating large-scale art on my iPad.
I am looking beyond lines and seeing what else I can conjure up with the medium. I now start with repurposed very high-resolution images of my own large-scale portraits, in-process work and original digital drawings.
I continue to work on them on my iPad where I add various marks, masks, enhancements and graphic overlays to the base image which I then reproduce as an individual image, GIF or video. They are prepared for HD display on monitors, as projections on gallery walls or as on-line presentations. I also produce high-quality images which I print on metallic paper and then bond to aluminum composite panels.
