Bill Claps

My work comments on the imagery, motifs and language used by artists and art critics throughout art history.  I use references from sources as varied as calligraphy, language and code, expressionism, the human figure, Asian landscape painting, and appropriated images from contemporary art and attempt to understand their place in the continuum of artistic expression.

 

The “Natural Abstractions” series is my homage to the 18th century Japanese master printmakers whose graphic style greatly influenced the European Impressionists. In this series I create contemporary interpretations of nature motifs used and repeated by many generations of artists.  I use source photos taken from the natural world to create mixed media artworks that I finish with a unique gold foil process that I developed.  Each work is executed in a positive and negative, in order to articulate the duality that is the basis of much of oriental culture.

 

In these recent works you can see my fascination with the natural world, captured up close and translated into autonomous compositional elements, which at times recall geometric abstraction, oriental calligraphy, and cellular processes.  My unique technique recalls the Byzantine gilding practices, updated for the 21st century by combining them with photographic and digital processing technologies.  In recreating this history, I attempt to create dynamic images that live in balance between figuration and abstraction.

 

The mixed media works and videos in my series, “Artspeak” comment on the coded language used in art journalism and critique and analyze how people react to this language.  The mixed media works translate phrases taken from press releases of art exhibitions into Morse code, and the video “Enduring Conundrum” captures individuals from all walks of life repeating those phrases into their own words, revealing how they respond to contemporary art.

 

In the “It’s All Derivative” series I comment on the practice of appropriation and veneration in the art world by combining borrowed imagery from the past with the visual language of Morse code. The series originally came about as I was thinking about my influences - both in my art and in my life - and I started playing with images and artists who have influenced me the most. I began to realize that as much as we want to complement ourselves for all the “brilliant” work we’ve done in our lives, nothing we do is totally original - it’s all derivative on one level or another.

 

My works express a search for the motivation and meaning behind artistic expression.  As an artist, unless you’ve grown up in a windowless room, it’s impossible not to have been influenced by all those who have come before you, and you need to pay homage to that.