Many people ask me why I paint exclusively in black and white. The simple answer is that I don't; I sometimes paint in colors, when it serves a creative purpose. I find there to be a great deal of expression available in monochrome work, and a great deal of subtlety that is hard to achieve amid the distraction of colors. The other little thing is that when I started out I had very little money, so I bought a tube of white, a tube of black, and some stretcher bars and began cutting up old tents to paint on. Even in my color paintings I usually limit my pallette in some way to help unify the elements in the composition. In some cases I will even grind my own pigments, and leave them unsifted for a desired texture.
| The Right Hand and Left Hand of Fate. 36"x 36"
|
| I was walking on a chilly evening, when I encountered a friend. We were both dressed in layers of woolens, wearing warm hats and spinning, I with my right hand, her with her left, I spinning the wool of a black sheep, her that of a white, I making Z-twist, her S-twist. It was as if we were bookends, each wearing, doing, making, being, the compliment to the other. She suggested that I make a painting based on the experience. In it I have made it daytime, and to further emphasize the duality of the situation I have painted her looking very young and myself looking very old. |
| High Tide 36"x 24"  |
| A curious thing about Mud Bay is the fact the at the
tides here are backwards. Really, they are. This is because of the long distance between here and the open
sea, around 200 miles. High tide here is nearly six hours off from what
it should be reckoning by the moon. Low tide is when high tide should be
and the other way around. It takes a bit of getting used to, but here
we get to see the setting moon reflected on the cresting tide. It feels
wrong, but it is beautiful.
The shell is a manilla clam, and I put one hemlock into the Douglas fir forest. |
 |  |
| Moon in the Hinge of the Cockle 10"x 30" Setting moon, a new crescent over horizon of Douglas fir, and ash, seen in the hinge of a heart cockle. | Setting Moon, Rising Sun 10"x 42" Setting full moon, over the ocean, with the sun rising behind and shining on the inside of the same heart cockle. |
 |  |
| What the Crow Sees. 9"x 24" I keep looking at the bits of clam shell that the crows leave about, at all their little internal features, their colors and textures and forms. Each kind of clam has differnt patterns, and the more I look at them the more beautiful they become. This is the hinge of a Manilla Clam with the waxing crescent moon setting behind Douglas firs. | Dig Deep 15"x 30" The highest and lowest tides of each month come around the new and the full moon. It is only then that enough beach is exposed to dig for deep clams like the Geoduck. In this is the full moon and the new crescent are setting behind the trees, one on each valve of the Geoduck. Between the shells it is daytime and the Salal berries are ripe. |
Contemplating Greed and Excess
|
| A self portrait done in a mirror, and in a bad mood, origonally in pencil, and then rendered in oils. |
Winter 1970
|
| The odd thing about this painting is what way is up. I have mounted it so that it can be hung in any orientation, because it is a view looking up. When I was little My family was traveling around picking fruit in Southern California, when we found a box canyon that had a small cave in the back we moved right in. The canyon was lamp chimney shaped, and had a big piece of rock, which had spalled off the side and was sticking up partly blocking the wind, so that was where we built our fire. I would lay on the soft sand and look up at the sparks from the fire as they went up and mingled with the stars. |
Wind Blows the Stars Away |
| I came home one night when I lived in the redwoods; a storm was coming and a stiff wind blowing out of the South had cleared the fog from the sky. As I walked up to my door I looked to the East, and for a moment I saw the stars blowing away, like sand blows from the crest of a dry dune. First the northern stars went, Cassiopea and the dippers, then Tarus and Orion, and then the sky was empty. I shuddered and closed my eyes. When I had the courage to open them again the sky was restored, with the stars in their proper places, and blowing branches from the trees. |
The Horizons Olympia paintings are part of a series that is eventually to include views from Portland, OR, Seattle, WA, Vancouver, BC, and Anchorage, AK. They reflect my fascination with the shapes formed where the earth meets the sky, and the way those shapes contribute to a sense of place, even when they are sometimes obscured by the city that occupies that space.
 |
|
8"x 52" |
 |
|
8"x 72" |
 |
|
8"x 44" |
The Horizons Portland paintings are part of the series that includes
the above paintings, and is to include images from Seattle, WA,
Vancouver, BC, and Anchorage, AK. I made the sketches that these
are based on from the area around the Wilamette Stone, near Skyline
Blvd. It somehow seems fitting to paint images of the views from
the location from which much of the northwest was surveyed.
 |
|
8"x 64" |
 |
|
8"x 36" |
 |
|
8"x 60" Sold. |
These next paintings, abstractions based on parts of trees, are one of my attempts to look for the beautiful in the very ordinary. Apple is simply a close look at a branch pulled from a pile of prunings one winter. The red cedar painting is based on one of the two ends of a cedar log cut from a tree that blew over in a storm. There is another based on the other end of the log, and not pictured here.
 |
 |
|
|
|
Chained to the Electronic Hearth is simply an expression of my frustrations about television and what it does to society.
 |
|
18"x 28" |
The Wide Open Spaces of Texas is based on a sketch I made while
visiting a friend in Dallas. I was struck by how in a place so
open, people could live lives so closed in. The only truly wide-open
thing there was the sky, and on the day I made the sketch there
was a storm looming.
 |
|
16"x 30" |
I like watching ravens in the snow. They seem so black against all the white, like a hole in the sky. One day I got to wondering, what if the raven was to tear a hole in the world? Hole in the Light of Day is my attempt at an answer.
 |
|
17"x 32" |
These next two paintings are nudes of the musician, Jenny Anderson, playing her mandolin, which she says is old enough to be her great grandfather. In the first painting Jenny is clearly the subject. I was looking at the way that she loses herself in the music when she is playing. In the close up painting I wanted to blur the line between subject and context, asking is this a painting of a musician playing, or of an instrument, with the musician's body as the backdrop? And further, from where comes the music, as neither makes it without the other.
 |
|
30"x 36" Sold. |
 |
|
28"x 18" |
The paintings that follow are a series of six paintings intended to be displayed together in the arrangement shown in the picture of the Small Scale Trial Paintings. It is easy enough to make a painting in which everyone sees more or less the same thing when they look at it. "Look, a picture of a girl with a mandolin, and one with a mountain." In these paintings I wanted to create images that people could look at and see different things, not just a simple inkblot test, but something with depth that makes the one think in new ways. "Is this coming forward or receding, is it a landscape or something alive, or is it some sort of symbol?" My intent is that all six paintings be displayed without their titles, so that the viewer is not instructed what to think about the images by what they are called. Number six is painted on a small box in which the titles of the paintings and a small mirror are mounted. This way the curious viewer has the opportunity to learn the titles, and see their own facial reactions as they do so.
 |
||
|
|
||
 |
||
|
36"x 30" |
||
Both 24"x 24" |
||
  |
||
|
Both 12"x 54" |
||
 |
||
|
7"x 4" |
I hope you have enjoyed viewing this small portion of my work, and that you will take any opportunities to see future artwork that will be coming out soon. If you wish to contact me about possible display or purchase of these paintings or any of my other work, do not hesitate to contact me.
Bill Dawson
3403 Steamboat Island Road NW
PMB # 527
Olympia, WA 98502
