Bill Graffis
Houston, TX
Artist's Website
Artist's Statement:
Often my work revolves around an idea, problem, or experience that I probe further, thinking of different ways to express it, questioning it’s outcome, validity, value, and connection within our society.
One theme I’m interested in expressing is my idea of personal memories, a memory decomposing in a sequence of images, reduced to the most basic visual elements as the image fades in time. I choose to visually limit the information the viewer sees thereby focusing on the initial response, freeing the viewer’s mind to search their own experiences.
The sequence of images over time has lead into exploring an ordinary moment in time, where pleasure is derived from a common act. Although fleeting, the moment is captured before it’s destroyed. The beauty is the moment in time, the common act, and the day after day ritual of documenting of one’s pleasurable existence that can add up to be, metaphorically speaking, a novel or a symphony.
In some of my more recent work, I’ve chosen to create contemporary art using traditional gilding materials and techniques (water and oil gilding over a clay bole and gesso ground) that could be considered unique, rare, and even a dying craft. Water gilding is a method, rarely used by artist today. It’s a demanding and time consuming technique that uses water to activate the glue in the clay bole upon which the gold leaf adheres. Once everything is dry, an agate stone is used to burnish the gold leaf to a mirror like finish, a finish that can’t be achieved by oil gilding.
I feel a great connection in the process of using materials that date back to the ancient Egyptian times and connecting this process to some of my contemporary work.
Artist's Bio:
Born
1961, Colfax, Washington
Education
1990 - Washington State University, Pullman. BS, Mathematics, minor Fine Arts, with an emphasis in Education
1987 - North Seattle Community College, Seattle, WA. AA
