SUMMARY STATEMENT I am drawn to art by way of philosophy. Or more correctly, I am drawn by philosophy into visual art. Art shows what philosophy cannot say. Perhaps philosophy will eventually learn to express the inexpressible, in which case it may no longer be theory but a form of art. For the art that I am intrigued with is the kind that avidly articulates the sensuous by way of a formed rationality. Generated from the initially unmade, from the position of materials that are neutral and natural,to the regulation or construction of those materials by way of a rational and active forming, the look is that of completion, or totality, of perfection. But this perfection is wrought with an inner dissonance. Every qualitative work of art pretends to be the totality it can never become. Its absolute is ridden with inconsistencies, pitched battles between sense and spirit, tightly packed with fragments that stubbornly resist incorporation. For me, the best art is both truth and illusion, individual and whole, particular and universal, utopian and dystopian, free and disciplined, precious and worthless. It is within this slippage (the paradoxes of art) that I locate my work. As such, it functions as a paradigm of diversity within unity. Its content is the struggle that it both conceals and reveals. The work performs as examples of a constructed symbiosis; as visual advocates of a world finding peace within its inability to reconcile the irreconcilable.
William C. Maxwell October 2014 (www.williamcmaxwell.com)
B.A., Wagner College M.A., Ed.M., Ed.D., Columbia University
