William Curtis

Abstraction may provide a way of condensing complex meanings in an apparently simple form. It permits one to probe hidden realities beyond the superficial features of the visible world. My own works distill my impressions of “nature” in this larger sense while also evoking memories and mythical themes. They sometimes allude to mysteries of water, geology, light and landscape. Yet they also suggest hidden presences, even energies and forces beyond natural phenomena. A drawing, painting or sketch may be like a seismograph, a mental map between inner and outer worlds.

 

These “mental landscapes” thus explore an indeterminate realm between the material and the immaterial, the artificial and the natural, the object and the idea. Some of them are like microcosms –small symbolic worlds– containing infinities of waves, clouds or strata of rock. But they are also pictorial ideas with no particular subject. Abstraction allows one to approach the generic and the typical while also alluding to several realities at once. Forms then take on a potent ambiguity and contribute to a metamorphosis in which one thing changes into another in a sea of indeterminate signs.