"In theory, theory is the same as practice,… In practice it isn't"
This is a quote by the famous baseball player, Yogi Berra, one of Wills favourite quotations. He chose to use this quotation because it's always a good introduction when talking to students from artistic practices, to suggest that these two items, are far from simple to explain and understand.
Artistic practice is as much about making mistakes, in fact more about making failures, and the actual finished work. You have to make lots and lots of successful failures in order to learn something to make one good piece. For example if one was to look at the work of Fleming, he discovered penicillin by accident. This was not an invention at all, but something that occurred completely unexpectedly, and yet changed the course of antibiotics and how we deal with medical infection for the next 100 years. Likewise, Alexander Graham Bell, when he "invented the light bulb" actually said he had 1000 successful failures, before he was able to create the bulb that worked.
Will was born in New York. His mother was a concert pianist. She hated practising particular pieces of music before a concert, however she had a method of just sitting at the piano and playing the scales until she got totally bored, to the extent that she eventually started to play the true peace that she should have been practising in the first place! All this was done while Will played underneath the piano with wooden blocks, a Tory that is much less frequently seen these days than it was during the 1970s. Because his mother spent so much time at the piano, Will also spent hours each day playing with these wooden blocks.
His relatives were also artistic, in the sense that they were poets and artists etc, therefore he was totally immersed into a background of art right from the beginning. He explained that many of the people that he came across as a child during the 1960s and 70s were kind of Bohemian, loose and free.
These early experiences helped to shape Will into the "underground" art scene. These were amazing times, because many of his relatives were already collaborating on artistic pieces with people such as Andy Warhol and Philip Guston. These artists all based in New York, were all part of the same community. However this idea of the artistic community in the Big Apple seems to have all gone wrong when big money started to get into art during the late 1990s.
Once Will had finished his normal schooling, it was obvious that he was destined to become an artist. He enrolled into the Joseph Albers colour course, and took a number of traditional academic yet practical ways of learning oil painting.
Will worked for many years without recognition; his earliest work that was considered successful was actually a sculpture, a bronze of a tin can together with a can opener. This was successful because both these items go together, there is another element of "interiority" and a connection between the two. The combination can be seen as a tribute to Jasper Johns and Marcel Duchamp.
Going back to his opening statement the quotation by Yogi Berra, there is not a theory that can be prescriptive in art, no one size fits all!
Once Will was on the journey towards success, he decided to move to San Francisco, because whilst he recognised that he wanted to be city-based, New York was too expensive to live in the centre of it as many artists were moving away, further south to Pennsylvania and outlying districts from the city, which then meant that travel time and costs were equally just as high. So San Francisco, considering that it was cheap at the time, during the early 1990s and before the dot-com business had started to go crazy, off he moved.
Whilst living in San Francisco, he focused mainly on drawing as the costs for studios even there was very high. By the time it got into the late 1990s, he was trying to figure out what being an artist actually was. He wanted to be part of a community but struggled to find it. He made his work at the time by creating book covers, difficult work because the majority of book covers that are created are usually rejected. But because he had such low costs, he could still eat. He also spent some time editing unusual magazine editions, now generally known as the zines. One example of this was "PAC mastery: observations and critical discourse".
The sort of work that he was creating were basic pictures of collages and everyday bits and pieces, things like cinema tickets, salt and pepper packets, and badly rendered drawings.
Once however one of the salt packet drawing study created, looked a little bit like a cube, similar to the game of "Tetris". These sugar cube type monument being built in a kind of naive three-dimensional space seem to ring a chord with Will.
These collages became an object to draw on to paint. Ideas of drawings started to coalesce. There was some elements of minimalism, post-modernism, architecture and so on, but also referential to digital and the locally booming dot-com market. Being in the centre of San Francisco, the epicentre of the explosion of the dot-com boom, creating digital style paintings was the stroke of luck that he had been looking for.
His first, in 2003, successful exhibition, displaying these paintings of what appear to be stacked cubes in all various different sizes and shapes, which came from that innocuous little packet of salt so many years earlier really struck a chord. In 2004 he had a small Japanese saki drink set made with his designs printed on the side. This led to a group show which was to be based in London, although by the time Will travelled there to set his exhibition up, in fact it was a back corner space in a bookshop owned by his now friend, Chris Johanson. Because he made friends so quickly, and decided to stay in London, the community that Will had been searching for started to emerge around him. Will considered that this was his first real break, the saki set was taking off, and he spent so much time creating these because what he noticed, in fact what he realised was that the price that he put on these sets was a price that he himself could afford. As a result everything sold out in the shop that he had created. This really got him noticed!
Will went on to talk about the writer, "Borges to" who once said "rather than write a novel, writer fictitious review of it - you don't have to do the whole thing then"!
In Will's world, everyday occurrences are always recorded wherever he can make notes, conversations, happenings and all other events that seem to be something different he tries to note down.
Another example the idea that things just seem to coalesce and developed over many many years, as some of the more recent work that Will has been doing. This is the case when he started to think about background images created by typewriter fonts. The details started to develop over many years and he created a series of works, the first one being "space surveillance variations in 2004" this was an interesting excursion into science fiction type themes under the heading of letterpress / found text / for example "notes from the chemical outpost" 2005, volumes 1 and two.
All this typewriter style work led to another series, and during his lecture will mentioned the writer and art critic, Bill Burkson who once said "looks can kill".
After all this success, will decided to take some time to work on his own study so he did some rescheduling into psychology. He describes all of this work in as "a window into the life of the mind" and he cited a piece of work which is close to my own heart, and that is Elgar's Enigma variations. Elgar chose to write the works based on a theme made from some of the traits of his close friends within the community that he worked at the time of composing this wonderful masterpiece.
And then finally, will summed up his journey in art. So then the turn to ceramics, and a series entitled "Enigma variations" based on the themes and characteristics of a number of Will's own friends. All of these ceramic items are handmade, but they are of a digital style based on those successful sugar cube type Tetris things that he created in the late 90s and early naughties.
I was particularly interested and will mentioned some of the things that make of creative. He talked about "Broadmans area 44", and the new scientific view that creativity actually comes from a specific area in the brain, which suggests that artistic creativity could be genetic, just like opposable thumbs!
For example, see Qualia, the subjective experience.
Conclusions;
- Find a community to work in, it's really important to fit in with 'like' people.
- You will make thousands of failures, but cherish them and embrace them, because just one time you will make a really successful piece.
- Sell your work for an affordable price.
- Take risks that are calculated, but not foolhardy. Will moved away from his home location, and appears to never have looked back!
- The most successful ideas sometimes come from the least expected places.
- Take a look at Broadmans area 44, and the 'Brokers area' of the brain, for some research.
- Take creative ideas from other people, make a genuine and apparent twist in them, and apply it to your own practice.
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