WILLIAM CHILL
Experiences in visual reality
Cleveland Ohio

William Chill - Artist Statement 2010 

My recent work explores the triangulation of art, physics, and the industrial landscape. The synthesis of this disparate combination of influences is a result of my history of experiences.  

I left my birthplace of industrial Youngstown, Ohio to study physics at Purdue University for my first go-around in college. The field of physics had a fundamental logic that made perfect sense to me, but I often got lost and confounded when I dove beneath the surface. This dichotomy of simultaneous understanding/lack of understanding is part of what fuels my paintings.

Lately, I have been interested in the writings concerning the controversial topic of String Theory - how everything in the fabric of our universe; forces, matter, and light is the result of tiny undulating rhythms of energy, or strings. How these strings vibrate and move about are the actual "stuff" that make up the elemental sub-atomic particles which construct our universe.

While there is no quantifiable experiment to validate String Theory, it has only been explained through complex mathematics. If mathematics can validate the theory, it is fascinating to me how something unseen can be explained. This is how I conceive the foundations of abstraction in painting. Through my many years as a painter, I have gone through various phases but have only recently been able to find a way to validate and trust non-objective painting.  

If vibrations of energy are the most fundamental element of physicality, then perhaps that is why we find music and other perceivable patterns aesthetically pleasing. Could this be the validation that undulating strings are in fact the building blocks of the physical world?

This argument would certainly not hold up to empirical scrutiny but it shows how art, and painting specifically, can endure as a medium that can reconcile the empirical with the mystical and indulge our senses.

There has been a myriad of references to science in writings about painting. Hans Hoffman in his influential book, Search for the Real, wrote that color is "a plastic means of creating intervals. Movement and countermovement result in tension. Tensions are the expression of forces. Forces are the expression of actions. The canvas is a world in itself."

Where I live now, in Cleveland, OH, is full of patterns and rhythms of the industrial landscape - the grid work of rail bridges; piles of salt, iron ore, and aggregates; aging brick warehouses, and gray skies - these are the symphony of forms by a city that builds things. They produce an elegant music that reminds me of the complex forces that construct our universe. There is a reason to this seemingly unintentional randomness of forms - they are the resultant order of a fundamental logic.

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