Faculty Spotlight 2013 > William Conlon

The Collider Series

How does a painter describe in words what he has spent a lifetime trying to communicate with a visual language of shapes spaces and color?

My answer after all these years of painting still can only be said visually and found in these three paintings, which are part of a new series which began in 2010 it is called the Collider Series.

What are the things that have influenced these paintings?

Matisse, flower gardens, Quantum Mechanics, Rothko, the large Hadron Collider, de Kooning, String Theory, Cubism, Chaos Theory, the internet, YouTube, Facebook, Formula1.

Shall I continue?

An analogy to the experience of looking at these paintings is, imagine standing in front of a normal full length mirror, you see your reflection it is perfect, you look great. Now put yourself in front of a fun house mirror. The image of yourself reflected back at you is quite different from your normal mirror, not a perfect reflection but a wildly distorted one. Your image is being starched and pulled over the uneven contour of the fun house mirror.

Comparing the two experiences, the normal mirror just reinforces your belief system, where as the fun house mirror forces you to see your self in a different way and challenges your belief system.

These three painting are like the fun house mirror, forcing you to see in a different way.

William Conlon