Sanctuary Featured Artist: Will Cares

In my recent work I am exploring new methods and new materials. These artworks focus on process and often cross the boundary between painting and sculpture. The main “subject” of these works is the dialectic of seeming opposites. Some of these oppositions include 2D/3D, white/black (with all that those words convey about opposition and race as well), clockwise/counterclockwise, life/death, Western linear time / Eastern cyclical time, and future-focused / present focused.

In my Circle Series I have used this most “perfect” shape as a symbol for existence itself. I have loaded a flat stick with paint and attached the stick to the painting by means of a metal pin. The stick is then moved in a counterclockwise direction to apply the paint in a wide uneven swath, much like the sweeping hand of a clock, but I move in the opposite direction. The counterclockwise motion is significant, I am going counter to the direction of Western time, thus I am “turning back the clock” as it were. In ancient Eastern models of time (Hinduism and Buddhism) there exists the “wheel of time” or Kalachakra, which represents time as cyclical, whereas most Western cultures view time (and thus life) more like a line or arrow, beginning at the left and moving to the right. In my fifties now, I am more aware of the passage of time and of the fleeting nature of existence. My father died in the Fall of 2015 and my mother is turning 85. My two children are grown men. As a teacher of Art, I have an acute sense of the tyranny of the clock, and of the need to be “timely” and future focused, yet I also feel a strong desire to slow the passage of time, to become more present in the now. This is largely due to the influences of Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and art making itself. The past is a memory and the future merely an illusion, all we really have is now.