The burden for most artists is not in beginning a new work, but in knowing when to put down the brush. To step away and declare that your finite representation of the infinite is complete. This represents a contrast in perspectives: the human-made versus the divine. The artist versus what the artist sees. In our current case, it is Will Thomson versus The Landscape.

Will’s work invites us to interrogate and recognize this contrast. The contrast creates a divide that is visible in every painting in this show. To further emphasize this point, Will named the show after a quote from Philip Guston who, speaking about the act of creation, said:

“Would you be as interested in seeing men fly, unattached and free, as you would be in seeing a man with, I don’t know, two hundred pounds of cement strapped onto him and let’s see him get two inches off the ground? I think creation is something like that. It’s not imagination and it’s not freedom and it’s not spontaneity. I think it’s a more human experience than that.”

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Will adds, “From looking at paintings, we tend to think they were made gracefully, intentionally and methodically. At points easily. This is mostly untrue and the feeling of painting is much more like lifting a weight for a few seconds, than flying. Irrespective of what it turns out looking like.”

For Will this feeling was particularly acute while working on landscapes. The moment he put down the brush the landscapes stopped growing. This created a pressure to rework each painting again and again, in an attempt to make them feel immortal, like an accurate extraction of the landscape.

This process imbued each painting with a history, memory, and depth that is reflective of the ways we view and understand the world. And this is not a theoretical explanation, but a quite literal one. Writing about the paintings in Two Hundred Pounds Of Cement Jack Dunleavey explains:

“Each painting is constructed of multiple, unrelated and unplanned layers of paint. Different paintings are made on top of one another but gaps are left, or scratched away, each layer masking the last. The forms are created in reverse, from a combination of elements from different layers. We are forced to read them in ways we aren’t used to, with the near things being read last and the far things first. On closer inspection, a branch suspending snow reveals itself to be snow suspending a branch.”

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Paintings do not spontaneously emerge – they are born from countless decisions about where each brush stroke should live, and the space between them.

Each of the paintings in Two Hundred Pounds Of Cement tells the story of the layers, changes, and brushstrokes that make them what they are.

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Will Thomson, Two Hundred Pounds Of Cement
opening reception

Saturday, June 10
5—8pm
536 Davis St, San Francisco