William Willis: Narratives of Invention

Ever since his first art exhibition at the Diane Brown Gallery, Washington, D.C., in 1977, William Willis has drawn his fair share of attention, not all of it consistent. His work has been described as religious, muted, iconographic, emotional, intellectual, accomplished, generalized, decorative, adumbrated, conventional, enigmatic, primitive, forceful, creative, synthetic, contemplative, transformational, metaphorical, elementary, textured, visionary, mythical, universal, and personal-so variously that one is left scratching the head.

Indeed, there is something quirky about Willis' work, something different and eclectic. His work vacillates between representation and abstraction, between the empirical and the transcendental, between the complicated and the simple. Looking at Willis' work, one is reminded of Arthur Dove, for example, and sees a kindred interest in quiet abstraction--but Willis himself resists such associations, having said in a Washington Review interview with Mary Swift that he objects to categorization and being pigeonholed, preferring, instead, that art be known by its "¼magic quality."

In talking of his work with Swift, Willis references Hindu philosophy, transcendentalism, American Indian art, and Russian iconography. There are obvious connections to Jungian symbolism, archetype, and myth. His palette consists primarily of earth tones--muted muddied earth tones, as Washington art critic Paul Richards, once observed. He is interested in geometric form and in the layering of images. His compositional process is re-visionary and intuitive. Finished images may take years to complete; he works in starts and fits on many projects at once.

What guides him is not calculated. Consider Willis' description of the creative process which resulted in one of most successful works, Falling Tree. As Linda Johnson describes it in "Between Moment and Memory," which accompanied Willis' exhibition, Contemporary Paintings: William Willis, organized by the Phillips Collection, Willis labored over the image for months, before putting it on the floor and throwing dirt on it. Not until months later did he return to the image and find an impulse to continue, working it through vision and revision, the traces of which are still evident in the surface.

Thus for me, at least, I can understand what does guide Willis and what does articulate a means for engaging and appreciating his work: it is his obsession with aesthetics, the narrative of composition. As Linda Johnson also observed in "Between Moment and Memory," Willis's work is not narrative, but there is nonetheless a narrative process which accounts for most of Willis' art. This narrative is not thematic, but it nonetheless tells a story, and this story does have plot points, many of them. In his work, the story Willis depicts is the story of his work coming into being, of the myriad associative, conscious and, especially, unconscious or intuitive decision-making processes by which his subject material is ultimately realized. It is highly meta-visionary and meta-technical, for Willis, I would argue, is far more interested in the means by which he produces his images than he is in the images themselves.

Beginning with grids and geometric forms, beginning with the desire to create, Willis labors over his surfaces, painting and drawing, scraping and revising, not so much guiding what he is creating, but rather reacting to it, trying it out, feeling it, riding it, merging it and letting it go, trusting the desire to create. In images such as "Ham Sa (The Gander)," one senses the desire to create fell short of a completed work of art. The energy waned, leaving us with a problem in both color and scale. Still, in other of Willis' work, we see the energy sustaining him to satisfactorily completed works. In Untitled (Avadhoota), Willis utilizes obvious symbols; superimposing these images, he concentrates instead on the field of perception, the vibrant energy of production that gives even these simple symbols a sense of weight and meaning which is borne of their being pared down to the simplest and most obdurate of elements-images which have endured and been passed down through the ages.

In working in this fashion, Willis will always run the risk of drawing attention from his subjects and to himself, even if he proclaims he is only the vehicle or means by which his art manifests itself. He runs the risk of being self-indulgent, and his artwork overly personal and thus cryptic to the general audience. My own personal preference is for the artist to remain "invisible," allowing me the subject alone to contemplate. Given that Willis shares both his failings as well as his triumphs, perhaps he should be congratulated for being courageous?

John A. Haslem, Jr. Ph.D.
artlinePlus Critic

Dear Dr. Haslem,

Thank you for the recent review of my show at Hemphill Fine Arts. It was one of the more intelligent insights of my work that I've has the opportunity to read. You hit the nail on the head. It is the process- not the images.

Best regards,

Bill Willis