Woodstock Times, November 30, 2006
Relics from his past, glimpses of his future
Bill Mead's pentimento pieces span time in geologic layers of paint
by Paul Smart
There was a period of almost half a year when painter Bill Mead, who lives on the edge of Woodstock's legendary Maverick Arts
Colony, had to wait for a contractor to get up the big pieces that he needed to finish the studio in which he works nightly.
The time, he says, had an excruciating quality to it - at least until he was able to fill it by sheetrocking and doing the
other finishing touches necessary to give his artmaking a proper home once more.
Bill's standing in front of a paint-splattered wall on which a series of his abstract works, all teetered between the
decorative and otherworldly, hang. He's talking about what he does, how long he's been doing it - maybe even the big question
of why a painter keeps painting even when he's not showing, not actually making any money from what most drives his life. The
wife and kid are inside the main house making dinner. For now, the painter is describing the other half of his heart: that
given to the process of creativity.
We've established that we both come from the same central Virginia city, Lynchburg, and know quite a few people and places in
common. My kid's now playing with his daughter, Clara. I've written about Bill's wife, a former WAMC newscaster and current
touring author of Public Radio: Behind the Scenes.
Mead started realizing that he wanted to really do something with art toward the end of his high school years, and ended up
studying the stuff at Virginia Commonwealth University when the place was starting to emerge as one of the leading lights of
contemporary art. He went on to museum jobs in Baltimore and New York before getting accepted into two of the top colonies
for emerging artists in existence these days: the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and the Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture up in central Maine.
Such places are built like launching pads for the most serious artists. Provincetown takes a full seven-month commitment to
straight studio time. Skowhegan's a long summer of intense studies with the nation's top contemporary artists. Both are
designed to impart serious dedication to one's creativity - a drive to explore one's work until it becomes wholly original,
completely personalized, yet tied to the rigorous line that makes up the historic arc of modern art.
After attending the two, Mead's career seemed to take off like a rocket. He began using raw teapot shapes to center what are
basically his painting experiments, and they started selling - selling so well, in fact, that for a brief time he became
known as "the teapot guy." At that point he decided to lose the central objects, the better to concentrate on what he was
exploring: the ghostlike pentimento effects that occur when an artist paints over his first effort, which years later become
discernable. In the process, he lost the momentum of his gallery career. No matter, in practical terms, given that Mead had
already built up a real-world business building museum display stands that would support him and his family, leaving his art
apart from any need for monetary income.
We explore the idea of pentimento for a moment - a term I had first learned via the Lillian Hellmann memoir of the same name.
It's a key to what Mead makes, from starting processes to final acts of completion, from choice of images to represent to
uses of color and even paint (the artist tends to work with a milk-based casein, very flat-surfaced and transparent).
"It always starts with an act of putting my mark on," he says of his painting, which he likes to do at the end of each day -
almost as a summing-up, as well as a reminder of who he is, what it is he does.
Sometimes those marks are comments on decorative arts: circles or floral designs; maybe a houselike shape. It hardly matters.
He tends to work in series of works, all loosely based around a similar concept. Nowadays the works are red. In the past
they've had floral elements - or teapots.
He builds his painting surfaces out of small pieces of wood that he puzzles together.
Then the painting gradually takes on its own life, over a period that can take anywhere from hours to months. He directs it,
responds to what he sees; moves paintings along the wall and at some point into the house, where he sees how it is to live
with what's been created. If it doesn't work, it comes back home to the studio.
Mead shows me piles of works that he's moved beyond and has started recycling, creating new works over the surfaces of old.
"I find that the important parts of a work tempt me to bring them back to the surface. What I do is a lot of scraping and
erasing, then submerging things back beneath color," he says. "It's a process that happens over and over again."
The works on his walls represent various stages of completion, from the finished to the just-started, which he terms
"glimpses into my own future." But all have a similar sense of accomplishment, being equal parts timeless and immediate.
"I try to distance myself from what I'm painting so I'm not thinking too much about it while doing it," he says, noting how
he'll listen to news shows or sports to engage all but the more creative parts of his brain while he's working. "I want to
keep the art from becoming precious." He says the process is a mixture: part wrestling, part "flow."
He says that he wishes he were a better salesman of what he creates. But all his training, including the 20-plus years that
he's put into his daily creative work in his studios, with these paintings, has taught him another serious lesson: that to be
really good, art has to feel ready to be out in the world - and not just for anyone, but for the painter himself. "In the
end, it's a way of keeping my sanity," he says. "I come in here and work things out that I like. And that's art."
And pentimento? How does it apply to his life, as well as his paintings - that act of allowing what's been done before to
shine through, to inform the surface?
It's a recognition, in the final rounds, of the powers inherent in time, in sticking to things - a recognition of the
complexities involved in seriousness, in adulthood. It's the fuel in Bill Mead's art.