Newbury Hat Shop Painting

This is an original oil painting by Paul William of a building on Newbury Street in Boston, Massachusetts. ----- “Lighting effects impress us; more than any object represented as large we find to be beautiful. Masses impress us...the vast extent of the ocean; by the dark profundities of the forest...accompanying ideas of duration, grandeur, power, and solidity.” -Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1765 ----- My current body of work is born out of my enduring admiration for the tangible, three-dimensional reality of the built environment. Not only for the end result we see today, but the history behind the buildings too. If only the walls could talk... By day I’m a construction project manager and spend hours working on building projects in the Boston area. Through this process I get to know a building intimately working on it every day for months (or years) at a time. But even more influential is living and working in Boston which enables me to see the city over time, in all seasons, weather, and times of day. If a motif catches my eye I often go back to places numerous times to see various conditions that will allow me to capture the feeling that I would like to communicate. Art, architecture, and building have always been a part of who I am. Most recently, my paintings are studio works that came about after a period of time spent painting en plein air. I like to consider myself a direct observational painter (like my painting heroes George Nick and Christopher Chippendale), but in the winter of 2018 I fell and fractured my knee cap, limiting me to the studio rather than painting outdoors. I spent this time painting larger works over the course of days and weeks rather than a spurt of an hour or two en plein air. I was not happy about being stuck indoors at the time but the silver lining was that the work in the studio began to develop, the series grew and a body of work ready to show emerged. The intent of my work is to ask the viewer questions. Who inhabits these spaces? What was the city like when the building was constructed? It’s important to consider what we know about the modern world and then how these decades and centuries old buildings fit into our lives today, particularly if we want to make them last.