Painter, Poet, Humble Lover
of Food & Music

I have considered myself an abstract painter, a landscape painter, and a painter of meat. The work can be formal, figurative and conceptual, and these genre are not exclusive. They are all considerations on the body, the physical and spiritual body in time and space, these can be (very literal) landscapes of location, more cosmic drawings of solar systems, they may address the carnal, sexual body, the aging body, its primal desire of survival and consumption, or the transcendent, spiritual body. The paintings form reflects this in a balance of meticulous craftsmanship and allowing chance and process to determine direction.

Meat Paintings
Comment 12.07

There is an element of performance in the meat paintings. Process is quintessential. Process is more important than the finished product. It confirms the transformation from subject to object. Perhaps more than portraits, there are biographies, or interviews with Steak, Oxtail, and Shin. I am interested in that transformation, physical and philosophical, of meat as art, meat as food (subsistence and culture), meat as sexuality, meat as death and birth. Besides the act of painting, process includes the initial selection (and purchase) of the subject and eventually its final preparation and consumption. So for pleasure or survival, another process begins.
The work is not a character-study which objectifies, but again, an interview which recollects an individual history. Like a photograph of a condemned man, its about the moment of death as much as the expectation and aftermath of the end.

All my paintings are based on this same kind of dialogue. Like chess, painting is an exchange, a battle of wits. It is a physical structure to thought and a strategy for flawless victory or dignified reconciliation. Process is the trace leading there, a trail of blood and of hope, of error. In Tradgedy the fate of the subject is known.

As our carnal bodies admit defeat, they seek reconciliation. We too transform, and the consciousness of our mortality flavors every move we make.

CELESTIAL BODIES. Paintings 2008
I dream the Body Cosmic,
From Muscle and Bone to Tissue and Liquid. Structure dissolves, like an Ortolans.
From Earthly Subsistence to Biological Decomposition and Spiritual Transformation. A Zero in Limbo.
From the Storm the Chaos the Eruption which, ordered, Formed life. Structure returns, like Ices.
Of Celestial and Terrestrial Bodies, Space & Transcendence.
COSMOS. Ghosts of Infinity.

William Pettit